


... cuz a vanguard party don't stop

by apiphile



Category: The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Deception, Gen, Incest, M/M, McGuffins, Motels, Paris - Freeform, Sequel, consider this a variation on sex pollen, deceit and the lying liar who uses it, i can't be bothered with my usual tag essay, i know fuck all about anything, magical mcguffins, stephen strange has a stupid costume, steve rogers: has a darker side, well technically not incest, you're just going to have to wait and see
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-02-03
Updated: 2015-02-03
Packaged: 2018-03-10 09:18:32
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 24,435
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3285008
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/apiphile/pseuds/apiphile
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>So Fahye wrote me this fic for my birthday (http://archiveofourown.org/works/2401172) and when I asked what she wanted for her birthday, she said "a sequel".</p>
            </blockquote>





	... cuz a vanguard party don't stop

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Fahye](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Fahye/gifts), [lanyon](https://archiveofourown.org/users/lanyon/gifts), [cribbins](https://archiveofourown.org/users/cribbins/gifts).
  * Inspired by [ain't no party like a vanguard party](https://archiveofourown.org/works/2401172) by [Fahye](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Fahye/pseuds/Fahye). 



They took him to Sam’s apartment, in the end. 

“This is when I could use a top-secret flying base with state of the art hospital facilities,” said Steve, manhandling an unconscious Bucky into the back seat of a car which, lacking in foresight, was a two-door. He climbed in after, and lifted up the slumbering head of the operative he was supposed to refer to as the Winter Soldier, so he could sit down.

He let Bucky’s head lie in his lap.

“Listen,” said Sam, as he began to reverse the car out of the motel parking lot – it was a mark of the class of the establishment that no one had batted an eyelid at three disparate people dragging an unconscious man into the back of their car in broad daylight – “I know he’s your friend, but we don’t know how much that means right now. If that tranq wears off while I’m driving and he starts going crazy, well –“

“I’ve got another,” Natasha said peacefully, settling into the shotgun seat. 

“No,” said Steve.

“At least strap yourself in,” Sam said. 

Steve complied.

“A base that hadn’t been infiltrated by Hydra at every imaginable level,” said Natasha, as if the conversation about tranquilisers hadn’t happened, “might be useful.”

“My apartment building exploded,” Steve said ruefully, looking down at Bucky’s face. He seemed anguished, even without conscious thoughts to torment him – frowning up close-lidded at Steve as if he was trying to work out a puzzle and the beginning, never mind the end, was eluding him. 

“Mine is public knowledge,” Natasha offered. “All of them are.”

“Exactly how many apartments did you have?” Sam asked.

“You could Google it,” Natasha said, putting her foot on the dash of the rental car. 

“Not while I’m driving,” said Sam, accelerating down the back road. It was nearly empty. 

“Twenty-six in the United States,” said Natasha, after a long pause, “and four permanently rented-out hotel rooms.”

Sam whistled. “SHIELD’s expense account was a lot bigger than the army’s…”

Natasha shrugged. “They owned a lot of property.”

Sam snorted. “They made us fly coach.”

Steve said, “Heck, sometimes you didn’t even get a plane.”

“Damn right,” said Sam, smiling at him in the mirror. “No stewardess, no movies, no itty bitty bottles of Jack Daniels – just me and whoever was trying to shoot me down.” He tapped the steering wheel as they came up against a red light. There was no other traffic at the intersection, and Steve felt a stirring desire to tell Sam to floor it, to stop for nothing but old ladies and baby carriages. And dogs. 

He looked down at Bucky. No, there was no good to be had from drawing attention to themselves right now – even if they looked like the only vehicle for thirty miles, Hydra could still be watching. Steve straightened up: the red light was still red, and a sudden worm of doubt crept into his mind. 

What if every light was red, and every crossing blocked, from here to Sam’s apartment, to head them off? What if the remnants of Hydra – he caught himself. 

What if whoever was drawn to Bucky, a fragment of a weapon to be repurposed and remolded – already compliant, already broken – Steve took a deep breath and looked down at Bucky’s frowning face once more. What if’s weren’t contingency plans. 

If they wanted Bucky they’d have to goddamn well try and take him.

“Of course,” said Sam, pulling away as the light turned green again, “I had fresh air and no airline food. Man’ll take a lot of bullets and anti-aircraft missiles over reheated plastic hamburgers worse than MREs.”

“I would never have thought you were a food snob,” said Natasha, putting her hands behind her head. “Steve, are you militantly opposed to airline food?”

“Food’s food,” said Steve, watching her closely in the mirror. Was there something about her face that was unfamiliar? Did Natasha look too confident, not confident enough? Too hard to read?

He gave up. She was always hard to read. That was the _point_ of her.

“Oh, of course the skinny boy from the lower east side doesn’t care as long as it has calories,” Sam said, as the two-door quietly ate up miles on the deserted road, and stands of pine trees swept past them in silent, familiar deep green. 

“Lemme guess,” said Steve, watching Bucky’s chest rise and fall. “Tash must be an indiscriminate eater because she’s a Soviet relic?”

Natasha shook her head in the mirror and raised her eyebrows. “On the programme, we were trained not to have preferences. You have to eat what you can, when you can get it, but look like you’re disgusted by even the finest wagyu steak or delighted by airline burgers with MacPlastic cheese depending on your assignment.” She stretched. “Also, I smoked. It takes the edge off hunger and the taste off what supplants the hunger.”

“Gross.” Sam shook his head. “See, this is what happens when I’m the only non-super-powered man in the car. I have to stand up for normal food consumption. And take you guys to Willowherb.”

Steve pushed a greasy, intrusive wave of hair from Bucky’s cheek. “Willowherb?”

“It’s a restaurant three blocks from my apartment.” Sam flicked on the wipers as rain began to spot the glass. “With enough flavours for the smoker and carbs to make a dietician weep. I’m going to teach you two to enjoy food if it kills me.”

Steve glanced up, and out of each window in turn. Nothing possessed with a powerful sense of irony seemed to be attacking the car. He looked back down at Bucky, and surreptitiously slid his hand over his chest, feeling the determined thump of a heart that just wouldn’t quit.

In the mirror, Natasha raised her eyebrows at him.

“When does that tranq wear off?” Sam asked, accelerating again as the rain began to worsen. 

“It was supposed to go around noon,” said Natasha, unconcerned. “Better for us that it doesn’t.”

“Is he _okay_?” Steve demanded, though his hand and his ears and eyes told him Bucky was breathing normally and his pulse was sure and strong.

Natasha shrugged minutely. “Without the right equipment, we can’t know.”

Steve took four or five shallow breaths and tried to uncurl his hand from the fist it had moulded itself into. He put his hand in front of Bucky’s mouth, two or three inches away, and satisfied himself that the breathing sound he could hear was breathing.

He glanced out of the window again.

The dark green of passing pines made him deeply uneasy.

* * *

They made it to DC a day later, without anything exploding, without anyone shooting at them, without any questions that Natasha couldn’t answer (“he drank too much, officer”, and to Steve’s disgust, “no, he’s our friend, and he rented the car himself, we have the papers right here”), without getting a flat or starting a fight, and without Bucky so much as cracking open an eyelid.

“One minute,” said Sam, as they pulled up outside his apartment in the dead of night. “Can I have a story for my neighbours, so they don’t get completely freaked out by me hauling in a passed out white dude in a weird costume?”

“Why are your neighbours looking out of their windows at 3am?” Steve asked, adjusting Bucky so he could unstrap them both. 

“They don’t know this engine,” Sam said, switching it off. “And no one wants to be shot without at least some warning.”

“This looks like a nice neighbourhood,” Steve said, reaching for the door handle.

“It _is_ a nice neighbourhood,” said Sam, opening the driver door and coming around to help him, even though it was clear Steve needed no help and, Steve thought, probably clear that he didn’t want anyone else to touch Bucky for any reason right now. “But it’s also a nice _black_ neighbourhood and the police are the police, you understand?”

“Unfortunately,” Steve said, “I do.”

“He’s a veteran,” said Natasha, hopping out of the car.

“What?”

“He’s a veteran who got kicked out of his apartment and drank himself into a stupor in despair,” Natasha continued, taking Sam’s keys from his hand without Sam even noticing. “That’s your cover. He’s staying with you for tonight.”

Steve hoisted Bucky up in a fireman’s lift. He tried not to remember the times Bucky had lifted him like this (“you fucking dumbass, you’re gonna die if you don’t learn to stay away from gas leaks with your goddamn chest”), the times Bucky had just dragged him behind him on the sidewalk (“does it hurt? Good, it fucking should, you dumbass – quit picking fights with guys four times your size”), the times Bucky had sprung money neither of them had for a doctor (“it’s cold, everyone gets fucked up by the cold”). He tried not to think about how the weight of Bucky Barnes was distributed so unevenly now.

Sam stood aside and let them parade in through his door. Steve caught a glimpse of a woman leaning out of her window to watch them, silent as the grave, her lips pressed together.

“It’s okay, Mrs P,” said Sam, softly. “We’re gonna have him back on his feet soon.”

The door closed behind Sam, and Steve felt his way through the apartment in the dark, his path illuminated by red, orange, and green LEDs from this and that. Natasha opened the door to the one bedroom.

“I’m not gonna ask how you know where my bedroom is,” said Sam, from the doorway.

Steve laid Bucky out on the bed, and pulled up a chair.

“Logic,” said Natasha.

“I was gonna say I told you,” Steve said, sinking into the chair and immediately pressing his chin into his hands. “It’s less spooky than –“

“Logic isn’t spooky,” Natasha said, standing in the doorway. “It’s not a big apartment and there are a limited number of floor plans available to mass builders.”

“Jesus,” said Sam, from outside. “Couch or floor?”

He listened to their brief negotiations, and through the curtains saw the security light at the front of the building go on and off a few times. 

The conversation from next door died down. Bucky’s breath whistled gently in the still of the bedroom, and far away, then closer, sirens ate up the still of the night. 

Steve realised he was holding his breath, like it was Christmas Eve, and he was waiting for Santa Claus, waiting with all his might: _medicines for Mom, Santa. You can do it this year. I believe in you. Don’t let her down again, big guy. I swear to God I’ll make you suffer._ Waiting now on an altogether less comfortable visitation. 

But no one stirred, and no one came.

* * *

Grey dawn light, diffuse as if behind a wall of paper, began to fill the room and nudge Steve’s brain from its state of torpor. The apartment faced the wrong way to get the first rays of the sun: Steve watched the sky outside slowly acquire colour and life, and by craning his neck could see distant contrails marking out their territory on the always-scarred air over the city. 

Natasha said something in the other room. Sam mumbled something back, still plainly half-asleep.

A moment later Sam, still wearing the clothes he’d worn yesterday, and the day before, appeared in the doorway of his own bedroom, scratching the back of his neck. “Did he wake up?”

Steve shook his head. Sam looked concerned.

“You know, I know you don’t like this, but I think he’s gonna need hospital.”

“He _definitely_ needs a hospital,” said Natasha, from behind him. Sam moved out of the way. “If this is physical. If he doesn’t have a shut-down code that’s activated somehow. Either way, if he stays under for long he’s going to need nutrients intravenously, and Sam doesn’t have the equipment here.”

“I might,” said Sam, hopelessly.

“You don’t.”

Steve hesitated, but shook his head again. He passed his hand over his face. “No, not yet. They’re looking for him.”

“They have bigger problems,” Natasha said, leaning on the doorframe. Sam surreptitiously moved out of her way. 

“He’s a valuable asset,” Steve pointed out, hating himself for the terminology, and abruptly hating both Hydra and SHIELD in the same thought for their persistence in reducing individual human beings to ‘assets’. He thought briefly of the army. If only it had _started_ with SHIELD and Hydra. 

Natasha shook her head. “He _was_. He is a relic now.”

Steve said, “He was obsolete when their programme was in place, but with Zola gone and the ships destroyed, he’s valuable to them again. I can’t risk them whisking him away in a, in a white coat and taking him from under our noses.”

Natasha conceded, or appeared to concede, his point. She peered past Steve at Bucky, and Steve followed her gaze. He seemed to be sleeping peacefully and normally: his breath was strong and steady and his face was still puckered in a frown of confusion. Steve wondered if he was dreaming, and how bad they were if he was. It was out of the question that they’d be pleasant: no one had good dreams any more.

There was a buzz on the door bell. 

Sam and Steve froze, immobile reflections of each other, Sam already reaching for a gun that wasn’t on him, Steve for a shield safely in storage. 

Natasha said: “Barton.”

“What?” said Sam.

“He said he was on his way,” said Natasha. “I’ll get it, if you don’t mind?”

She left the room while Steve was gripped in the jaws of indecision, and Sam caught his eye and shrugged, painfully. “Maybe he’ll have an idea how to wake up sleeping beauty here.”

“Barton’s not what you’d call a strategic thinker,” said Steve, cautiously. “And he’s not a doctor.”

“Hey,” said Sam, “like every other computer literate person on earth, I read the guy’s files. I know. I’m just saying, maybe he’s seen Dr … what was his name? Banner.”

Steve shrugged. “Maybe.”

There were voices in the room next door. 

“I’ll talk to him,” said Steve, feeling a small weight slide from him at facing whatever unknown danger there might be head-on. “Stay here a minute?”

Sam acquiesced, apparently unfazed by taking orders in his own home, and sat down in Steve’s chair. Steve slipped into the room next door, and found Barton in civilian attire and unnecessary sunglasses.

His heart quietly picked up the pace.

“How is he?” Barton asked, lifting off the sunglasses to show an impressive bruise.

“What happened to your face?” Steve asked, ashamed of the cheap ploy, but unable to stop himself. He tried not to stare too long at Barton, trying to work out whether he was himself or not: he’d not worked enough with the man to know, really, what he was like. Susceptible to possession, someone Natasha held in extremely high regard, when her regard was nearly impossible to acquire, former circus brat, formerly starving: like Steve he had the habit of knowing where the food was in any given room. But out of sorts? He’d never have been able to say.

“Tenancy issues,” said Barton, screwing up his face. It did little to help the overall effect. “Is there a bathroom? I came as soon as Nat called and stopped for nothing and now I kinda need to stop for something.”

Steve pointed wordlessly. Barton leaned past him to wave at Sam: Sam waved back with a fraction of an ironic smile. 

When he was gone Natasha caught him by the arm. “He didn’t recognise the pass code. He got it wrong.”

“What?” Steve said, his eye widening as she held his gaze. 

“After Loki ransacked his memories,” said Natasha, under her breath, “it was necessary to create a new signal.”

Steve nodded slowly, and looked up from her, to the closed bathroom door. His heart thudded.

He looked back down at Natasha again: she had changed into a different t-shirt, but judging by how it fitted it was one of Sam’s spares. He caught her eye again, and caught his breath. Was it simply a cover for her own deceit? If Barton wasn’t peeing in the bathroom, who was? 

Or maybe Barton was peeing in the bathroom and someone else had their hand on his arm.

Steve struggled to maintain a thread of sanity through the centre of his assumptions. He looked back into the bedroom, where Sam had rested his lips against his extended fingers, and was looking at nothing. A good guard. 

“It’s in your hands, Steve,” said Natasha, getting his attention. “What do you want us to do?”

Steve watched the bathroom door open and close, and Barton returned, wiping his hands on his jacket with the kind of deliberation that said he’d only just started the habit of washing them after he peed at all. Or perhaps the deliberation was –

“You and Barton find a likely hospital,” said Steve, at last. “And check _everyone_. Hail Hydra every single porter, janitor, delivery driver…”

“Aw,” Barton objected, “I just got _done_ being punched in the face for this week.”

“If we find any,” said Natasha, reaching for her own t-shirt on the couch and changing into it without pause – Steve averted his gaze – “then you can be the one doing the punching this time.”

“That’s how I thought it was gonna work _last_ time,” explained Barton, pointing at his black eye. “That’s not how it worked out at all.”

Steve returned to the bedroom and relieved Sam. 

He sat down and watched Bucky’s chest rise and fall as Sam pressed some food of some kind onto Barton – always a willing recipient. He stretched out his hand slowly, and let it lie on the coverlet beside Bucky’s foot. 

The door slammed.

“You should look into sleeping,” said Sam, from the doorway. “It’s been three days.”

Steve shook his head. “Luckily, the United States Army and SHIELD engineered between them a man who doesn’t need sleep.”

“Physically,” said Sam, squatting beside him, “I believe that. Mentally, though… Everyone needs sleep. Even Natasha sleeps. I’ve seen her do it.”

“She wasn’t sleeping.”

“My point is,” said Sam, following Steve’s gaze. “You’re safe now, or as safe as anyone’s gonna make you. I can guard my own apartment. You need rest or you’re not gonna be any good to him.”

Intellectually Steve could see the sense in this argument, but the part of him that had always responded to being slugged in the face by yelling _is that all you got_ and trying to bite his assailants in the knees refused to accept it. He gave Sam a sidelong look, and wondered if he’d just sent away two allies in favour of keeping a cuckoo by his side.

Sam patted him slowly on the arm. “If you don’t wanna sleep I can always make you coffee,” he said, “I’m just saying, if you want to get back to battle-ready mentality, now’s the time to do it. You could sack out next to him if you need to be sure.”

Steve turned his full gaze on Sam and said nothing. In the back of his mind he wondered whether Sam had any inkling what kind of important Bucky was: not just to him, but potentially to the world as a whole. Then he wondered if he himself had any idea what Sam had lost when his partner went down in flames.

Probably not.

Over an expanding gulf, Steve said, “I’ll be okay.”

Sam shrugged and left the room. Steve squinted at his departing back, looking for some hint of gold, some item of dark green that hadn’t been on him before, but in the gloomy morning light it was impossible to tell.

* * *

He woke with a start. The light in the room had barely changed, and the engine idling outside was still idling. However long he’d nodded off couldn’t have been more than a few minutes: Sam was still watching the same show in the next room and he didn’t think it had gone to commercial break yet.

Steve pinched himself and sat upright. He didn’t know what had woken him, but he couldn’t have said, either, what had sent him to sleep outside of the monotony of his watch and the strain of trying to determine which of his companions was a fraud. 

He remembered, vaguely, his thought patterns before nodding off: _what if God isn’t kind, but just a bigger version of what Loki is to us? What if God means to be kind, but he’s like Thor, and his big heart is too easily duped? What if God is indifferent? What if Tony’s right and he’s just a comfort blanket to keep us from the horror of an unfeeling universe?_ No wondered his brain had decided it would rather be asleep at last.

In the golden afternoon light he examined the room. Standard training exercise for special operations: stand inside the room. Go outside for ten minutes. Return to the room and catalogue everything that’s changed. Minute differences in the lie of the curtains, the way the dust swirls in the air. Marks on the counterpane. Men, you can’t go through your life just bayonetting whatever comes in front of you: intelligence matters.

Bucky lay breathing peacefully. His chest rose and fell, rose and fell. Steve’s heart beat a little slower.

The curtains were drawn back to their fullest extent, as they had been. 

He turned to look at the rest of the room, and knocked a small pink stone off the arm of the chair. Outside the apartment the idling engine started up and a car pulled away.

Steve bent to pick up the stone from the carpet. It was polished, smooth, bigger than a nickel but not by much. The pinkness was rosy, suffusing through the depths like clouds, translucent and vague. The surface had a sheen to it which brought to mind opals. 

He held it up to the light. It hadn’t been cut for insertion into anything, but it was too polished to be naturally-occurring. More to the point, it had no business _naturally occurring_ beside him on the arm of the chair, where he’d have seen it before he passed out.

 _I should ask Sam about this_ , thought Steve, uneasily. _Maybe it’s his_.

He slipped the pebble into the palm of his hand and closed his fingers around it. His gaze wandered – drifted, automatically, as if the centre of gravity in the room lay there – back to Bucky. Bucky dented the covers. Bucky lay real, and solid, and living, and warm, and salvageable on this unremarkable bed.

Jesus, it had been so _long_. 

Unthinkingly, he ran his fingers over the surface of the pebble – smooth as glass, and almost warm to the touch. He reached out his free hand and laid it on the coverlet beside Bucky’s foot again. 

_You could sack out next to him if you need to be sure._

If he needed to be sure, Steve thought, rubbing abruptly at his forehead, he’d lie on the damn bed and lock his arms and legs around Bucky’s unconscious body and they’d have to kill him to prise him off. If he _needed_ to be sure he’d lock them both in a bunker a hundred miles from anyone and resume his motel-room pieta until whatever it was loose in Bucky’s brain slipped back into place and woke him.

The room was too warm.

If he really _needed_ to be sure, Steve thought, pulling the collar of his t-shirt down to let in a little air, he wouldn’t – they couldn’t – 

He shifted on the chair, uncomfortable.

Bucky breathed on quietly, his fingers twitching in his sleep. The room was warm, and Steve felt sweat beginning to gather on all the major sweat points of his body, but Bucky seemed untroubled.

If he needed to be sure he’d –

Steve’s mouth had dried out. He regarded the prospect of getting up for water with suspicion. His legs were tense, his stomach heavy – the whole of his lower body felt aggressive and alien. He was momentarily sure he’d smash anything he touched. 

He wiped his forehead, licked his lips.

In the next room the show went to a commercial break.

“Hey,” said Sam, entering. “I was gonna make coffee if you… are you okay?”

“Fine,” Steve said, thickly. “I’ll take that. The coffee. Sounds good. Sounds great.” He tried to smile and resorted to showing his teeth. 

“Uh huh,” said Sam, the poster boy for unconvinced. “Uh. Why have you … what’s in your hand?”

Steve meant to say, _I found it, is it yours?_ , but his mouth felt thick and uncooperative and his breath was hard and fast. His heart, too, had grown excited, thundering away inside him. He was painfully _aware_ of his body in a way that he rarely had been ever since the serum.

Sam reached out his hand. “Can I have a look?”

“It’s mine, you can’t have it,” Steve snapped. 

Sam raised his eyebrows. “I… think maybe… I need to get a glass of water for us both…”

“You do that,” Steve said, breathing hard. “It’s hot in here.”

“No,” said Sam. “It isn’t.”

Steve tried to stare him down, but Sam gazed back with unwavering coolness. Steve plucked at his t-shirt again, feeling it stick to his chest, move against his nipples, which were far more of a presence in his mind than they usually were.

“Okay,” said Sam, presently, still unmoving. “I don’t think I like whatever it is you have in your hand.”

“You can’t have it,” Steve said immediately.

Sam gave him a slow, wide-eyed nod. “Yeah. I don’t … actually want it. I just want you to let go of it.”

It occurred to Steve that Sam was not a small man. Of course, he could take him down easily, but he was – he almost presented a _challenge_. Not like Bucky – he glanced at Bucky to reassure himself – but a challenge nonetheless. He could slam into him and knock him to the ground and it probably wouldn’t even hurt him much and –

“I really don’t want to take it out of your hand,” said Sam, still in the doorway, his hands behind his back. “I’d like to go through this life with my limbs attached. But uh. I’d be really grateful if you’d just let go of that thing. I’ll stay over here.”

Steve looked at his hand. It felt far-away, hot, and dangerous. He almost couldn’t feel the stone in it at all, so warm it had grown in his grasp. His knuckles were white. The tendons in the back of his hand stood out. 

“Please,” said Sam.

Steve unfolded his fingers with considerable effort. He thought they might crack – his index finger clung on so that he had to peel it back with his other hand. 

It brought him no relief. The room was still hot. His body felt alien and overly-alive. He thought he could feel his blood moving. 

“Just let it drop,” Sam suggested, clearly puzzled by the content of Steve’s palm.

Steve tilted his hand slowly – against the wishes of his muscles, which seemed to have better ideas.

The stone slid from his palm and onto the carpet with a dull _thump_.

“Okay,” said Sam.

Steve exhaled slowly. He felt for his pulse: it was racing, but racing toward normality. He held his wrist a little longer, feeling his heart rate drop by degrees and his breathing even out. The room grew cooler.

He caught Sam’s eye.

“What the hell.”

Sam shrugged and looked away. “You uh, you looked different.”

“Sweaty,” Steve said, wiping his forehead with his t-shirt.

“That was part of it,” said Sam, with an uncomfortable expression. “Actually you looked –“ he stopped, and examined the ceiling. “I don’t know what that thing is but I don’t think it’s just a pebble.”

“Have you ever seen it before?”

“ _No._ ” Sam frowned down at it. “What the hell is it doing in my house?”

“Brainwashing me, from the feel of it,” Steve said, under his breath. “Good thing you noticed…”

Sam nodded very slowly. “Dilated pupils, red face, panting, tense body, unfocused stare, sweat –“ he looked at the ceiling again. “I could say it looked like you were having a heart attack but there were, uh, there were a few signs that wasn’t it.”

Steve frowned.

Sam nodded pointedly in the general direction of Steve’s lower body.

Steve watched with a kind of detached indifference as the remainder of an erection slowly ebbed away. He looked back at Sam. “It’s never really been much of a problem.”

“What?”

Steve shrugged, suddenly uncomfortable all over again. “Sex. Not hugely into it.”

“And this is you when you’re back to normal?”

Steve gave him a warning look, and turned his attention back to the stone as it lay, harmless and inert-looking, on the carpet beside him. “I mean there were a couple of times but God, not like the other guys, and not like _that_.”

Sam raised his eyebrows. “Apparently you get your rocks off to rocks.”

“Never make that joke again.”

Sam snorted. “What do we do with it?”

Steve glanced at Bucky, and back down at the pebble. “I have a feeling someone is going to want to know about this. If SHIELD still existed I’d say –“ he thought about this for a minute, “—also, why the _heck_ is it in your home?”

“I’d love to know,” said Sam, grimly. “Until we can figure that out, put it in a jar or wrap it, or something, because that was…”

“Messed up,” said Steve.

“Uh huh,” said Sam, “I’d have gone with less PG-Rated language myself.”

“An officer has to set an example,” said Steve, absently, “and not fucking cuss and swear in front of the enlisted men.”

“Yessir,” Sam nodded. “Wrap it?”

“My gloves are in my jacket,” Steve said.

Sam left with haste, and Steve took a deep breath. He looked back at Bucky: he looked at the door, and he wiped his face a second time. It didn’t feel the way he imagined Barton must have – something cold probing in his head. More like something rising inside of him, as if it had always been there and was just biding its time.

He didn’t like it at all.

Steve wiped his mouth on the back of his hand.

Sam returned with the gloves. “How old are these things?”

“Six months, maximum,” said Steve. “They were in storage when SHIELD went down. Natasha managed to get to that particular cubby before anyone who’d read about it had the right kind of explosives to get the door open.”

“I thought they were part of the original,” said Sam, obviously disappointed.

“Those,” said Steve, pulling them on, “have blood on them.”

“Literal or metaphorical?”

“Both.” He bent down and picked up the pink stone between thumb and forefinger.

After a moment Sam said: “Yeah okay, put it in a jar.”

Steve turned his head and found Sam was very slightly out of focus. “Huh?”

“Put it in a goddamn jar,” said Sam, reaching under the bed. “And don’t lick your lips like that, Jesus.”

He pulled out a canister. It was opaque, army green, steel-sided – Sam unscrewed the lid. 

“Thermos.”

“In case of emergencies?” Steve suggested, dropping the stone into the flask with an effort of will. Almost immediately, the breath he didn’t know he was choking on began to fade back to normal. 

Sam set down the flask on the floor. “If you call eating soup in bed an emergency.”

“Depends on the circumstances.”

Sam leaned back against the wall beside the doorway and exhaled slowly. “Why does weird fucking shit follow you everywhere?”

“Hey,” Steve sank back into the chair. “You’re not that weird.”

* * *

The room had begun to darken once more by the time there was a rap on the door: Steve jerked himself out of his thoughtless, open-eyed doze and waited for the sound of Sam’s response to tell him how high on the alert he needed to be. 

“Look who I found,” said Natasha’s voice, in the next room. This, to Steve’s mind, bordered on the wilfully obtuse: she’d have said the same thing had she uncovered Tony Stark or a high-ranking agent of Hydra or, Steve suspected, that Tony Stark _was_ a high-ranking agent of Hydra. Natasha was not one for unnecessary exclamation.

Sam, however, dwelt in the realms of the normal both when he was a hero and when he was Sam. He said, “Pleasure to meet you, Dr Banner,” and Steve guessed he’d turned his head to the bedroom door to make it easier for Steve to hear him, because his voice got slightly louder.

He glanced at the jar beside the bed, and the bed’s occupant. Both still in place.

“Some kind of warning before you leap out at me, next time, would be appreciated,” Bruce said dryly. “Today could always be the day I don’t have much self-control.”

“ _I_ did no leaping,” said Natasha coolly. “That was all Barton.”

“Where are they?”

For an answer, Sam opened the door. Steve got out of the chair and took Bruce’s hand. He felt the man flinch from him, the way he flinched from everyone, and recalled that he’d have been better off not touching him at all. 

“Good to see you.” He lifted his eyebrows at Natasha. “So, you just happened to find Doctor Banner at the hospital?”

She shrugged shamelessly. “You seemed very unhappy about the whole hospital idea, so I went and found someone I knew you’d trust,” she said, in bald ‘if a, then b’ Russian problem-solving tones. Steve nodded: it would be a very dumb man – or a very arrogant one – who didn’t accept that Natasha probably knew better than him in most situations. 

“Where’s Barton?” he added. _It’s great you’ve brought me someone trustworthy,_ Steve thought, _providing it **is** Bruce you’ve brought here_.

Natasha caught his eye. “Outside, ‘standing guard’.”

He read the inference. Even if he’d made up his mind to trust Barton was who he said he was, was under his own control, she hadn’t. The slip over the passcode would consign him to non-responsible duties until she’d cleared him in her own mind.

 _Good thing we’re as paranoid as each other_ , thought Steve, glancing at Bruce.

Bruce looked profoundly confused by all the clandestine glancing. “Natasha says my recommendation for a tranquiliser worked out rather better than expected?”

“Too well,” said Steve, “he’s been out for days.”

Bruce turned to the bed, and Steve felt every muscle in his body tense in preparation of wrestling him to the ground and punching him in the head. 

“He seems …” Bruce looked back at the three of them, dotted around the room: Sam standing in his own doorway in silence as if members of the Avengers routinely dumped their dilemmas all over his property, only a small quirk on his lips to show his resignation. “He seems peaceful.”

“He’s been asleep for a little longer than I’m happy with,” Steve said, feeling something in his jaw twitch under tension.

Bruce nodded. “I may need slightly more equipment than my own two hands,” he shot a look at Natasha, “to determine whether there’s something wrong… what reactions are taking place… I’m not a _faith healer_.”

Steve nodded, uneasy with the idea of letting him lay hands and potential machinery on Bucky when he still couldn’t tell if Bruce Banner was Bruce Banner or a handy deception. He’d shown up awfully conveniently. 

“How much of it do you have in your car?” Natasha asked.

“I don’t carry an MRI scanner in my black bag,” Bruce said, with a smile that Steve didn’t altogether like but which he recognised as being uniquely Bruce. “He needs to be in a hospital – at the very least a university facility.”

But Natasha snorted. “That might have worked a few months ago, Doctor Banner, but everyone’s very well aware of the developments SHIELD made in scanning and monitoring technology now.”

“For _military_ purposes.” 

“It has medical applications.”

“So does cyanide, if you consider euthanasia a medical application.” Bruce pinched the bridge of his nose and let his chin sink against his chest. “I don’t suppose you happen to have any of these _wonderful new developments_ in your purse?”

Natasha took the jibe with the same indifference that she took every barb Steve had ever seen anyone level at her, and said, “No, but unlike everyone else, I know you took some from R&D.”

He gave her a sidelong look. “Been keeping tabs on me, _Agent_ Romanov?”

“Old habits,” said Natasha, without a flicker of guilt. “Those are in your ‘black bag’, right?”

Bruce nodded. “I don’t … I don’t recommend their use.”

“They performed exceptionally well in field trials,” Natasha said, squeezing past Sam. Steve watched her go, watched Sam pull himself out of her way as if he’d never been in it, leaving the path open for Bruce to cooperate. 

“On normal people,” Bruce said, hand on hip. “Sure. This man –“ he gestured over Bucky’s body like a minister flicking holy water on some stricken sinner, “—has been adulterated in ways we don’t have a single damn file on. Some of the things they did to him, only Zola knew, and he’s gone. Even if he _didn’t_ have a hunk of Hydra machinery stuck to his side that these scanners could potentially interfere with, we have no idea what they’ve implanted in his brain.”

Natasha said, “Your concern does you credit, Doctor Banner, but—“

“ _Some_ of us,” said Bruce, a little acidly, “have a mandate to preserve life.”

“ _All_ of us,” said Natasha, without changing her expression. “If you would let me finish.”

Sam drew back from the conversation and pretended to hide behind Steve. Bruce made a ‘go on’ gesture with both hands.

“The field tests,” Natasha said, “were also performed with me as a subject. I came to no harm.”

Steve was briefly struck, once again, by the tangential similarities between SHIELD and Hydra, and wondered which agency had been responsible for the tests. He wondered what they’d involved, and what Natasha’s definition of ‘no harm’ was, given that he’d seen her roundhouse someone with a broken ankle.

“You’re not him,” Bruce pointed out, reasonably enough.

“The Black Widow programme and Hydra’s Winter Soldier programme are both mutations of the Super Soldier programme,” said Natasha, softly. “Think of them as siblings. There is enough similarity to the things in my head, and the things in his, that I can give you this confidence. He won’t be hurt by it.”

Steve realised she was talking to him rather more than she was talking to Bruce. If she already had the scanners, she already knew how to operate them: Bruce was merely their keeper, a façade of objections to be overcome so that Steve would acquiesce.

He rubbed his temples. This raised, again, the possibility that Barton, standing outside alone, was the ally, and not her.

Bruce followed Natasha into the next room. “Okay,” he said, “I’ll get them.”

“Lemme help you with that,” suggested Sam, assuaging Steve’s fears for him in a single sentence.

He led Bruce outside. Natasha turned to Steve and raised her eyebrows: Steve shrugged. 

“What if it wasn’t a tranquiliser?” she asked, as the front door closed.

“Since when were you suspicious of Dr Banner?” Steve asked, coming to the bedroom doorway, but no further.

“Since you started looking at him like he was wearing his own skin as a disguise,” said Natasha. “Work on your poker face, Captain Rogers.”

Steve gave a stiff salute.

“What are these scanners?”

“Field scanners. They –“ she caught his eye and said, “they work along the same principles as radar, but at a much smaller scale, and they look for electrical activity.”

“How does that—“

Natasha tapped the side of her head. “Your brain communicates with itself with electrical impulses. Attach a small net of these things, they create an isolation area, and scan everything within that area – ignoring any ambient impulses.”

“So it goes over his head?”

Natasha nodded. “Guess what they were developed for?”

“Finding bombs.”

“Close,” Natasha said, rolling one shoulder. “Finding hostages.”

“Heat vision?”

“We had a run of organisations who got wise to that and started keeping theirs in tanks of cold water,” said Natasha, studiedly blank-faced. “Negotiations would go on, and anyone elderly or young or starving – so most of the people they took – would die of hypothermia. And then we’d be told: well, you should have accepted our requests sooner and they’d still be alive. _We_ didn’t kill them.”

Steve swallowed, and listened for the front door.

“They are also useful for finding various weapons,” Natasha conceded. “So many have guidance systems as standard.”

“Thank Stark Industries,” said Steve, under his breath.

The front door opened and closed. Sam, carrying a paper Whole Foods sack, held up his burden. He peered into the bag. “They look like a bunch of tiny Go-Pros.”

They returned to the bedroom, which in Steve’s case only entailed stepping back twice. 

Bruce waited for Sam to shake out the tiny devices onto the bedspread. They looked very much like ‘a bunch of tiny Go-Pros’, each maybe an inch cubed.

“How do you--?” Steve began.

Bruce took out his phone. “Everything has to be cross-compatible these days.” He showed Steve a black screen with a graph on it, which left him none the wiser. “Do you want me to –“

Steve wrestled with the desire to tell Bruce not to lay a finger on Bucky, and nodded instead. He watched like a hawk as the tiny, boxy devices were laid out in a halo over Bucky’s sleeping head, and:

“Ready,” said Bruce.

He tapped something on his phone screen, and every single LED on the tiny devices lit up at once, crowning Bucky in a red diffuse glow. 

_Did it have to be red?_ Steve thought, folding his arms. He put his weight on his back foot, held his breath.

Bruce turned the phone screen to Steve again. There were several lines lancing in uneven jags across the black graph. As Steve watched, one lit up in a burst of bright light and faded away again. Another ticked away peacefully and regularly as a clock.

“You might need to translate,” said Steve, tucking his fingers into his armpits defensively. “Neuroscience isn’t my forte.”

“It’s not mine, either,” Bruce sighed. “But that’s just brainwave activity for normal sleep. There’s nothing wrong with him at all.”

Steve frowned.

“He’s not waking up.”

“In medical terms,” said Bruce, “he’s inexplicably stuck.”

“Medical terms.”

“I’m not a neuroscientist,” Bruce reminded him.

“Give him an adrenaline shot,” said Natasha.

“She is also not a neuroscientist,” Bruce said in a stagy whisper.

“It will wake him up,” said Natasha. “You say there’s nothing wrong with him.”

“That’s showing up on the scans.”

“No abnormal electrical activity?”

“None.”

Natasha said, “And there would be, with any kind of implant –“

“It might be chemical,” Bruce pointed out.

“He got sideswiped by a train while we were trying to catch him,” Sam pointed out, inserting himself into the conversation at a point where, Steve guessed, he felt like he knew he had something to contribute. “I don’t think an adrenaline shot’s going to hurt him.”

Bruce looked to Steve. “It’s your call.”

It was, Steve thought. If the question had been ‘do you rescue Bucky from a burning building’, the conclusion would have been forgone. If it had been ‘do you thaw Bucky out from some weirdo cryofreeze facility’, it would have been the same. Rousing him from what was apparently a featureless several-day nap shouldn’t require this much deliberation.

“Do it.”

Bruce said, “I don’t carry adrenaline shots around with me.”

“Lucky for you,” said Sam, pushing past them all, “I keep shit like that in the medicine cabinet.”

“… Why?” Steve asked, as Sam made for the bathroom.

“It’s called ‘preparedness’ in the Air Force, Captain, I know the Army don’t like it but you could always stand to learn from us,” Sam called over his shoulder.

“Are you sure about this?” Bruce asked.

“What do you think is going to happen?” Steve said, hugging his own chest. “I mean, it’s adrenaline. It’s not…” his gaze strayed over to Natasha. She shrugged.

“For reasons which may be obvious,” said Bruce, dry again, “I don’t like the ‘stick in a needle and see what happens’ approach to science much anymore.”

“It yields results,” said Natasha.

“Spoken like a true living weapon,” Bruce said, under his breath. “Not everyone’s okay with being a result.”

“Guys.” Steve pinched his nose. “Can we concentrate on getting Bucky woken up and somewhere close to starting to recover.”

Sam returned with two sealed plastic packages and a small bottle. Steve gave him was what now the customary once-over, trying to see if he’d changed, if there was anything about him which was out of kilter with the Sam he’d come to know.

He watched Bruce assemble the hypo, and draw up fluid into the chamber.

“D’you want to—“ Bruce began, holding out the needle.

Steve figured if anyone was going to jam a needle into Bucky it had better be him, but he thought better of it. He shook his head. “You know what you’re doing,” he said, and pinched his own underarms with the tightness of his grip.

Bruce bent over the bed, and took Bucky’s good arm. He extended it, and rubbed a thumb over the inside of his elbow. Steve bit the inside of his mouth.

Bucky’s eyes flew open. Before Steve had a chance to register anything else, he’d almost _swum_ up the wall behind the bed and slammed into the windows.

“Fuck!” said Sam.

There was a smash as Bucky dived through the now-broken window.

“Fuck,” Sam added.

Steve lunged forward, onto the bed, up the wall, out the window. He landed in a roll, and took off running over scrub lawns. “DON’T SHOOT,” he shouted at Barton, accelerating after the dark blot in his vision that Bucky left.

“That don’t fucking work—“ yelled someone from a nearby building.

Steve gained on Bucky. His mind nagged at him. Something was empty. Something that had changed. 

Well yeah, Steve thought, annoyed by his own brain as he launched himself over a chain-link fence, what with mysteriously-appearing pink stones…

“GET THE GODDAMN HELL OUT OF MY YARD, YOU’RE TRESPASSING!”

The _jar_ had been empty.

It registered as a blur in his mind – Steve bolted between two parked cars – but the jar, as he passed it, had been empty.

He caught Bucky by the heel.

“It’s okay—“ Steve began, and tripped him.

Bucky made another concerted effort to escape from his clutches, lashing out with a foot that caught Steve in the jaw. Something off about that, too. A kick to the face might have been the Winter Soldier’s style, but it didn’t connect the same way as before.

Steve threw himself bodily on Bucky, slammed him to the ground. 

“What in the hell are you doing on my lawn?”

He seized Bucky’s wrists and yanked them up above his head.

Bucky smiled up at him, a pinched and triumphant smile.

“No,” Steve said, as a hideous inevitability filled his mind.

“Yes,” said Loki, as Bucky’s face faded from view. The body squirming underneath him with an eel-like ferocity that Bucky had never aspired to was longer, thinner, more uncannily symmetrical. The face beneath him, smirking into his, was more focussed, and a thousand times more crazy.

Steve grabbed a fistful of long, greasy black hair – it felt like oiled seaweed to touch – and slammed the back of Loki’s head against the ground, aiming for sidewalk and finding a concrete curb. “WHERE THE HELL IS BUCKY?”

Loki laughed in his face.

“WHAT THE FUCK DID YOU DO WITH BUCKY?” Steve shouted back into his. He could hear running footsteps, distant sirens – he hoped not for him – and the unwelcome: _is that Captain America?_ somewhere off to his left.

“I warned you,” Loki said, trying to drive his thumb into Steve’s eye.

Steve smacked Loki’s hand back into the curb and drove his knee into his crotch for good measure.

“I told you he’s worth a lot to the right person,” Loki said, trying to head butt him in the face.

“WHERE IS HE?” Steve barked, backhanding the Asgardian in the face, for want of anything stronger than his fist to hit with. 

Loki arched his back. “Well aren’t you conflicted?”

Exertion, thought Steve, as sweat began to run down the side of his face. It was exertion. Discomfort at the presence of someone who’d brought untold misery to the earth, and exertion. He tried to slam Loki’s head against the curb again, but missed the worst of it.

“I see,” said Loki, and Steve felt his thighs pushing up to meet him.

“Steve,” said Natasha’s voice, somewhere behind him.

“I don’t have him,” said Loki.

“Stand back,” Natasha instructed. Steve very badly wanted to, but his legs didn’t seem to be on board with the idea.

“I’ve already sold him,” Loki said, lying back against the grass with his head against the curb, his neck angled back as if he couldn’t be more relaxed. 

“Steve, get back,” Natasha shouted.

“It’s called a _distraction_ ,” Loki said, as if he was talking to a child.

He convulsed, abruptly, and for a moment Steve couldn’t work out what had happened. He lay, dumbfounded, on an unconscious body that smelled of blood and steel and snow and a marked absence of sanity. He levered himself off slowly, trying to negotiate with his own body to _calm it down_ before someone saw and got the wrong impression.

As Natasha helped him to his feet and, with raised eyebrows, provided a nonchalant shield from prying eyes, she said, “Sam’s going to talk to people.”

“Right,” said Steve, dazed.

“Are you okay?”

“It _was_ Bucky we caught,” Steve muttered.

“Your face is red,” said Natasha, under her breath. She dropped to her knees and pulled something out of her pocket. It was long, thin, and flexible, and within a few seconds she had Loki’s arms bound behind his back so tightly that Steve might have winced in sympathy, if he’d had any left to spare.

“What did you do to him?” he asked, scooping up the unconscious body. He wondered if he’d been carrying an illusion the whole time: Bucky had felt heavier than this, his arm dragging him down, and more compact. Did that factor into Loki’s light shows? 

Natasha discreetly pocketed something from the grass. It looked, in the instant that he saw of it, like one of the tiny Go-Pro boxes.

“Don’t tell Bruce,” said Natasha, “but they can also be induced to emit a very powerful burst of energy, if you don’t mind burning them out in the process.”

Steve gave her a guarded look. “You weren’t going to tell me, either.”

“I didn’t know if we’d need to,” she said. “Neural disrupter. Useful.”

 _Dangerous_ , thought Steve, as they walked through the rapidly-assembled crowd with Loki as limp as a ragdoll in his arms. _But useful._

* * *

Natasha secured Loki to a chair in the basement. Barton plastered a sign over the basement door informing the rest of the building that it was temporarily out of order. Steve stood back from the chair and waited, and waited.

Every second that slipped past, whoever had the real Bucky was getting farther away from him. He could feel them rushing through him like sand through the pinch of an hour-glass, one at a time. He glanced at Sam, who was watching the scene with unreadable calm: Sam said, quietly, “What exactly is happening here?”

Steve said: “Nothing I want to ask you to be in the room for.”

“Yeah,” Sam said, “I think that means you need me to stay.”

Steve shook his head. “I don’t.”

“Trust me,” said Sam, after a pause, “if you want me out of the room for whatever you’re planning on doing in here, you need me in the room to keep it from causing you nightmares.”

Steve held his gaze for a minute, and relented. “I don’t dream all that much.”

“It’s still my building,” Sam said, “I don’t want this causing anyone else nightmares either.”

“I could just go and look for Bucky right now,” said Steve, more loudly.

Natasha, putting the finishing touches on some un-Girl Scout-looking knots, took this suggestion and gave it the consideration it deserved. “You have a good source of intel right here,” she said. “If you want to start out in the right direction I’d suggest sticking around.”

“You think he’ll answer?”

“I think he’ll answer eventually.” Natasha inclined her head gently. “I’m good at getting information out of people.”

“Do whatever you have to,” Steve sighed.

He caught Barton’s expression out of the corner of his eye. When he stepped back, Barton muttered, “You shouldn’t ask that of her.”

Steve said, “He’s immortal.”

“ _She’s_ not.”

“The pebble,” Sam said, suddenly.

“What?” Steve asked, jolted out of an ethical dilemma that was threatening to fence with his own sense of rising guilt at measuring expedience against unexpressed wishes.

“It wasn’t in the jar.”

“I kn—you noticed?” Steve raised his eyebrows. 

“I realised,” said Sam. “While you were diving out the window.”

Steve rubbed the back of his neck thoughtfully. “I guess we assume he has it?”

Barton raised one hand slightly. “Uh. What are we talking about?”

“Something appeared in my room,” Sam said, before Steve could think of how to explain it. “And then disappeared. A pink pebble. A weird, weird pink pebble.”

“Well, he’s still out,” said Natasha, with a shrug. “If you want to frisk him.”

Sam and Steve exchanged a glance. 

“Uh,” said Steve. “You… go ahead.”

They watched in tense silence as Natasha made brisk work checking any reasonable hiding-spot for a pebble. They watched her move more slowly, and with a more concentrated frown. They watched the tiny beads of sweat begin to form on her forehead, and her face grow pink. 

She stepped back, and licked her lips.

Steve cast an enquiring look.

“I can see why you didn’t want to do it yourself,” she said, under her breath. “I can’t be sure.”

“He’s still got it,” Sam murmured. 

Natasha gave him a quick, appraising look. “Is that what it does?”

“I guess,” said Sam. “If it’s worked on you, he still has it somewhere.”

“Worked how?” Barton asked, from the back of the basement. He’d taken up a seat on someone’s laundry hamper and looked like he might sit there all day if nowhere better to sit occurred to him.

“It has certain, uh, certain physiological effects,” Steve said, as he glanced at Natasha. He wasn’t sure how comfortable, exactly, she was with having the involuntary effect spelled out in a room otherwise full of men who were at least nominally her friends.

“Sexual arousal,” Natasha said baldly, putting Steve out of his misery. “Not as crude as the electrode-stimulation sort.”

Barton said, “Oh, gross,” and fished out a candy bar from the side of the hamper. For a moment Steve wasn’t sure if he meant the situation or the Babe Ruth bar, but he held up the latter and added, “Do you think anyone will mind if I eat this?”

“Not if you leave them some money,” said Sam. “Make like a pre-emptive tooth fairy. Leave them a buck for the cavity they were going to get.”

“Cool.”

“Time to wake up,” Natasha said, placing another of the small cubes against Loki’s temple. It remained stuck in place as she took her hand away: she reached into her pocket, stepped back two paces, and Loki’s body convulsed again.

“Jesus,” muttered Sam under his breath. Steve was inclined to agree. It was one thing to knock down an opponent who might conceivably be escaping justice, and another to … neutrally electrocute him awake.

Barton, however, didn’t appear to be bothered. Steve supposed when someone had gotten inside you that badly, you weren’t so inclined to feel much sympathy for a little unwarranted suffering on their part. He thought about how Loki had cost him the chance to see Bucky safely home, and his heart hardened fast enough.

Loki’s eyes opened. He gave the situation his appraisal, and sat still and silent in the chair as if waiting for something.

Steve watched Natasha adopt a position not dissimilar to _at ease_ , as if she was prepared to out-wait him: he watched Barton casually finish the Babe Ruth and stick a dollar bill into the laundry hamper. 

He watched Natasha and Loki lock eyes in a clear battle of wills.

He lost his patience.

“What the hell have you done with Bucky?” Steve demanded, taking a step forward.

Sam put out an arm in the pretence of restraint, and Steve forced himself to respect it as a genuine barrier. There was the risk that if he ploughed forward too hard he’d dislocate his shoulder, and Sam had done nothing to deserve that kind of pain.

“Sold him,” said Loki with a small smile, still staring into Natasha’s eyes. “I told you.”

“Who did you sell him to?”

“Someone in possession of something I wanted,” said Loki, without a pause. His expression was almost quizzical. “A bargain is a bargain.”

“Where is he?” Steve asked, maintaining his position behind Sam’s arm with difficulty. 

“Oh, far away from here, by now.” Loki’s gaze wavered from Natasha’s, and strayed over to Steve with another faint smile. “I’m sure you’ll get him back.”

“What is that damn stone?” Sam interrupted, putting a hand on Steve’s arm to keep him grounded.

Loki’s expression creased into something less distantly amused. He said, “Not what I wanted. One of its relatives. But I think you’ll agree it’s good enough for now. Either you can’t keep your hands off me or –“ he smirked, “you don’t want to put them on me.”

Steve lunged, ducking under Sam’s hand in a brief remembrance that he didn’t have Steve’s capacity for healing, instead of ploughing right through. He knocked down the chair, and as his breaths grew shallower and his vision redder, he put his boot on Loki’s throat.

“Steve,” Natasha said, a quiet voice in a maddening storm.

He pressed down harder, but the sensation was already creeping up his leg. 

A second or two later there was an unpleasantly familiar feeling inside his lower gut, and weight was slowly adding to his muscles.

“Steve,” Natasha repeated, and he stepped off.

Loki coughed, and coughed, and coughed himself into laughter.

“You need to look further afield,” he said, cackling on his back with a chair tied to him, “if you want your weapon back.”

* * *

They reconvened in Sam’s front room with Sam, incongruously, downstairs on guard. Bruce, his arms folded, blocked up the bathroom doorway: Barton threw himself onto the couch immediately, like a poorly-trained dog.

“What do we do with him?” Steve asked. “We don’t have anywhere safe to put him. We can’t interrogate him—“

“You could consider interrogation techniques that don’t involve needing to touch someone,” said Bruce, with a certain amount of disapproval. Steve saw his point, but also saw the somewhat larger context of finding out where the hell Bucky was, and he was damn sure Bruce didn’t rank that as a priority.

“I know plenty,” said Natasha, “but we’ve tricked him that way once before, and he’s slippery.”

“Extremely,” Barton said, from the couch. 

“And most of them,” Natasha added, “still require a safe place to hold him while we break him down.”

“No SHIELD means no resources,” Steve sighed.

“You know,” said Bruce, “Tony has plenty of resources. Both the money kind and the kind you want.”

“It’s not that I don’t trust Tony,” said Steve, trying to work out what he was going to follow this with, “it’s—“

“Technically,” said Natasha, “it’s Pepper who has the resources.”

“Right,” said Steve.

“And she likes me,” said Natasha, with a quick smile.

They returned to the basement: Barton pulled open the door with a professional-looking smile at a couple of kids standing outside, and blinked into the darkness beyond.

“Okay.”

Sam had pressed himself against the wall farthest from Loki. He was sweating profusely, and while Steve joined the rest of his team in keeping his attention at a level that wouldn’t humiliate Sam, it was plain to see what had got him into this state.

Bruce closed the basement door behind him.

“What the fuck are you doing?” Steve demanded, as soon as he was certain the kids outside couldn’t hear.

Loki only turned his gaze almost beatifically on him, and smiled.

He smiled for an uncomfortably long time.

“There is one other option,” said Bruce, from behind him, as Steve began to feel his skin grow warmer. “It shouldn’t be too hard to find Dr Foster and –“

“Thor,” said Steve, abruptly relieved.

Loki groaned like a bored schoolboy. “None of you, including her, can contact Asgard.”

“Is she still working in Bergen?” Natasha asked Bruce, reaching for the door to the basement at once.

“Back at MIT currently,” said Bruce, “or last I heard. I try to stay in touch—“

But she was already out of the door. Steve caught a glimpse of three or four kids trying to peer into the basement before the door closed again.

“And,” Loki continued, casting a put-upon look at the ceiling, “Thor has no power over me.”

“If you want,” said Bruce, “I can bang your head against the ground a few more times.”

“That wasn’t _you_ ,” said Loki, with a grim smile. “And you won’t.”

Steve took a command decision. “Stay here,” he told Sam, who didn’t look like he much thanked Steve for this idea.

“What’re we doing?” Barton asked, following him back up the steps to Sam’s apartment.

“I need to find out more about that weird rock,” Steve muttered, yanking open the door. “Everything that asshole touches is magical. I don’t know anything about magic, but from Fury’s intel files…” he crossed to Sam’s bedroom in few short strides, “I know someone who does.”

He picked up Sam’s laptop from under a chest of drawers. 

“You’re not meant to have seen those,” Barton pointed out.

“Everyone’s seen them now,” said Bruce. “Where’ve you been?”

“Bulgaria,” Barton said, with a frown. “Offline. Did I miss much?”

“Jesus.”

“Barton,” said Steve, as Sam’s laptop began to boot up more slowly than he’d have liked, “go down and relieve Sam from guard duty.”

* * *

A few phone calls, a few favours called in, and Bruce explicitly threatening someone over Skype gave them Strange’s current location.

Paris.

Steve drummed his fingers on the table where, until recently, he had been drumming his fingers on Sam’s laptop. Sam had, approximately thirty seconds ago, just leaned forward and moved it out of his way. The screen still tilted upwards and sprayed a Parisian address across Steve’s face like an insult.

At last, Steve said:

“Could we get him to come to us?”

Bruce shook his head. “As far as I know whenever SHIELD called on him it was at his convenience, not theirs.”

“We can’t just wave the prospect of a new magic trinket in his face and get him to come running?” Steve sighed.

“Strange isn’t Tony.” Bruce allowed himself a small smile. “You can’t pique his curiosity that easily, and unlike Tony he doesn’t need to be in the vicinity to get an idea of what you’ve got to offer. He’s less hands-on. I mean, he’s a … a w—a magician.”

“Not comfortable with that either, huh?” Sam asked, nudging Bruce. 

Bruce gave him a complicated look. “Sufficiently advanced science, etc.”

Steve made a gesture to the laptop. “He talks to demons.”

“Trans-dimensional beings.” Bruce passed a hand in front of his face, and pinched the bridge of his nose again. “Otherwise you have to start calling the asshole in the basement a _god_ , and nobody wants that.”

“Okay, but whatever _sufficiently advanced science_ he has, we need,” Steve said, staring at the screen again. 

“It’s just that dumb costume,” Bruce protested, weakly.

“Purple pants,” said Sam, quietly.

“I know,” said Bruce, “but have you seen him?” He reached down and opened up another tab, bypassing Steve entirely. There was an instant flood of publicity stills, all of which, Steve had to admit, had a similarly stagy feel as some of his early army publicity stills… and a very dumb costume. “Tell me he doesn’t look like a cheap Disney villain.”

“I can’t,” said Sam, “he does.”

“So we’re going to have to go to him,” said Steve, as if the conversation hadn’t happened. “I’m going to have to take Loki with me – we don’t know where the stone is, we don’t have anywhere to keep him, and if anyone can figure out how to _do something_ about a, a, magical … trans-dimensional being … it’s Strange, I guess.”

“World’s most prominent magician,” Sam agreed.

“So,” said Steve, “I’ll go.”

“You’ll need protection,” Sam pointed out. “If you’re dragging him around with you.”

“Admit you just want to see Paris,” Steve said, with a sudden smile that skated along the surface of his inner tension without breaking it for a second. 

“Guilty, guilty. I also want the crazy-looking fucker in the basement to _not_ stick a knife in you.”

“Okay,” Steve said, rubbing his face briefly. “How are we getting there?”

“I can source another wingpack,” Sam suggested, without much seriousness. 

“Was that made by _Stark Industries_ , by any chance?”

“A top-secret military project contracted to the leading arms manufacturer of the time?” Sam raised his eyebrows with heavy irony. “Get out of here, there’s no precedent for that.” 

Bruce shifted uncomfortably at the criticism, by extension, of Tony: it was fair, as far as Steve could see, but it was something he clearly didn’t want to think about. He wanted to say: _you and he have the luxury of being self-made accidents. The rest of us have to settle for being someone else’s weapon, and you’re going to need to get used to that_ , but as he wasn’t sure he was so used to it himself, he let it drop.

“You’d wear yourself out with two heavy burdens,” Steve said, instead, “and risk the effect of that stone on you somewhere over Iceland.”

Sam made a face. 

“You could just fly by civilian airlines,” Bruce said, with a cough. “Assuming you’re both cleared for that still?”

Steve glanced at Sam. Sam shrugged. “I’ve never had it revoked. I don’t recall Steve being on the no-fly list last time I, uh, definitely entirely legally accessed it.”

“Jesus,” Bruce snorted. “Security in this country is like Swiss Cheese.”

“Hydra,” Steve shrugged.

“The weirdo with the _stone_ isn’t cleared to fly, though,” Sam said, bringing the plan down with one straightforward issue. “He’s not even officially a real person. How’re we gonna explain him to passport control?”

Steve peered at the floor, as if he could see through two storeys and down into the laundry room where Barton was currently watching a handcuffed ‘god’, and after a moment said, “Dead people are always cleared to fly.”

“Uh…”

“Just put him in a coffin,” Steve said quietly. “He doesn’t have to be dead. He just has to be quiet.”

Sam looked at him for a moment and nodded slowly. “Okay,” he said, dubiously. “That is _cold_.”

* * *

Loki lay flat on his back in the darkness, a knot of cloth wedged securely in his mouth, tied in place with rubberised rope. He stared up at a wooden lid, surrounded not by white satin but with fresh laundry, his arms bent behind him and tied together with plastic zip ties. He lay still and silent as a freshly-buried corpse, and listened to muffled conversations of baggage handlers outside his transport as he was bumped, shoved, and thumped into the hold.

Loki imagined the great weight of possessions subsequently piled on top of him. He contemplated the possibility of somehow singeing through his bounds and starting a fire upon the aeroplane that would end all possibility of heroic schemes and create a beautiful inferno of havoc above the ocean. He breathed a few ragged breaths through his flared nostrils and, as more suitcases settled above his head, swore blind that when he was in full possession of all that he had come to this realm for, he would reduce the entire greedy meaningless human race to grovelling idiot worms and force them to eat their own disgusting unnecessary _suitcases_.

In this respect Loki’s fantasies did not deviate especially from those of some of the baggage handlers responsible for his current claustrophobia.

* * *

At Charles de Gaulle, Sam and Steve redeemed their coffin. The penetrating look given to them by the baggage handlers followed them all the way through immigration and out to a ‘private mourning room’. Steve frowned. 

“I admit I haven’t been to France in … a while,” he said, as they laid the coffin on a trestle table, “but they used to be a lot happier to see me.”

“How long is a while?” Sam asked, flipping up the lid without looking. “Like, fifty years a while? Because our previously cosy relationship with France has kinda taken a few hits in the intervening decades.” He winked, well-aware that Steve had done his reading (and frequent sighing) on the history of the twentieth century that he’d missed.

“I think,” Steve said, meditatively, as he braced himself to yank a resistant Asgardian out of a small space, “we look like a couple, and they were wondering whose dad was in the box.”

Sam stood back from the coffin for a second, and contemplated this. “Or they recognised you and wondered why the hell Captain America was bringing corpses to France?”

“It can’t have escaped your notice that we both look like variations on the same design,” Steve snorted. “A terrible matching couple.”

Sam pretended to be affronted. “A _great_ couple,” he corrected. “There’s more bicep between us than eighty percent of Fire Island.”

“Sam, I’m _ninety_ and I know that’s a dated reference.”

Sam peered into the coffin. His expression changed slowly into a collision of emotions, and he looked up hesitantly. “Are you seeing this?”

Steve glared into the dirty laundry piles. He couldn’t have said for sure what he thought Sam might be seeing, but what he saw was enough to knot his hands into fists and his head into a pretzel of fury. 

“Cut that the fuck out,” he told the body in the coffin.

Bucky’s motionless, grey-tinged face did not respond.

“Fuck you, Loki,” Steve said, under his breath.

“So I guessing you _are_ ,” Sam said, taking a step back from the wooden box. 

“If you think I’m gonna hesitate on beating the living shit out of you because you’ve made yourself look like that,” Steve hissed at the supposed corpse, “you don’t know me at all.”

A stewardess in the uniform of the Emirates airline poked her head through the door, caught sight of the open coffin, the muscular white man growling at a corpse, and the muscular black man looking at the ceiling tiles as if they had the answer to the major questions of life encoded in them, and hesitated, as well she might.

“Give us a moment please?” Sam said, spotting her. 

She gave him an alarmed grimace that didn’t quite match up to the usual forced smiles of airline staff, and backed out in a hurry.

Steve grabbed a handful of Loki’s hair – distressingly, it felt like Bucky’s against his palm – and smacked the back of his head into the side of the coffin. “Cut – it – out –“

“Steve,” said Sam, in a low, warning voice. “Just get him out of the box.”

“Can’t drag a corpse through the streets of Paris,” Steve muttered, slipping one hand around Loki’s throat in what began as a threat and became, quickly, a very real desire to just punish him for his existence. 

“So put him in a trash bag or something,” Sam muttered, “but quit throttling the cadaver.”

Panting, Steve said, “Don’t tell me he doesn’t deserve this.”

Sam caught his eye, and his expression was enough to pry Steve away from the temptation to squeeze the life out of Loki one fistful at a time. Steve stepped back, and brushed down his shirt with both hands.

“Fuck.”

“Yeah,” said Sam, examining the ceiling once more. “He’s got that stone on him _somewhere_ alright.”

Steve directed an annoyed glance at his crotch. “This is messed up.”

“Uh huh,” said Sam, leaning over the coffin. “Are you gonna cooperate and walk out of here on two feet or are we going to put you in a black plastic bag like the garbage you are?”

Steve watched the visible parts of Loki return to their natural state, and took a steadying breath. He reached back into the coffin and with one swift move, hauled Loki out and onto his feet.

He did not remove the gag.

“Taxi?” Sam asked, opening the door to the mourning room.

As an afterthought, Steve slammed the coffin lid shut. He hooked his fingers through the plastic loop of Loki’s handcuffs. The proximity was close enough that he felt hot, uncomfortable, and unnecessarily aware of his own skin, but not quite close enough that any problems beyond noticing exactly where his balls touched his thigh were likely to arise. 

Loki seemed worryingly docile, though his eyes as full of dark menace as ever.

“Taxi,” Steve agreed.

* * *

Two hours later, still sitting in the middle of a jam that made the tailbacks in Los Angeles seem rational and unremarkable, Steve wished he’d elected to take the damn Metro after all.

The taxi driver was explaining, in a mixture of French and English, how one day Morocco would produce a superhero greater than anything that had ever come out of America. He explained that in Morocco, there was no distinction between the super-powered hero and the ordinary hero, because ‘all men in Morocco are heroes’. He said something Steve didn’t quite understand about the polarising effects of pooled power, and then asked why their friend had a gag.

“He’s a racist piece of shit,” said Sam, before Steve could say anything, “and we’re taking him back to his family. We just didn’t want him to offend anyone _else_ on the way.”

The taxi driver applauded them for their practicality and said sometimes he thought men who couldn’t use their tongues respectfully should have them torn out.

“Yeah,” said Steve, making eye-contact with his prisoner, “I’ve thought that too. But we have to be better than them.”

* * *

Strange’s apartment was in a building that could have paid for the hospitals for an entire district. It looked about the same age as the Enlightenment. The taxi driver told them, as they got out, that most of the people living here did so as part of a contract. He said he’d driven executives from mining companies, arms companies, press barons; the companies owned the apartments and distributed them to their high-ranking employees.

“Stark Industries?” Steve suggested, overcoming the temptation to stick the boot into Loki as he hauled him from the car.

Oh yes, said the taxi driver. He’d even seen Miss Potts herself in one of the adjacent buildings.

“Huh,” Sam said, as they tried to find a buzzer that corresponded to the correct apartment. “I wonder if—“

“SHIELD owns Strange’s apartment,” Sam reminded him, jabbing the buzzer. “Want to bet Tony bought the other one when he found out?”

Steve stared up at the white stone walls of the apartments. Speculating on _why_ Tony Stark did anything beyond ‘he has too much money’ and ‘personality disorders’ never seemed to be particularly fruitful. It was funny who you ended up counting as a friend.

“Yes?” said an unctuous voice from the speaker.

“Steve Rogers here with a problem that only you can solve,” said Steve. He glanced back at Loki in time to see his prisoner rolling his eyes to the heavens, and wondered again why a squirmy mass-murderer with a penchant for stabbing was behaving himself so well.

“Fascinating,” said Strange, dryly. “Since our mutual contractor is no more I can only assume you’re here in a private capacity.”

“Listen,” said Steve, impatient. “I have something very magical, and very dangerous, that I need you to look at, and I need it to not be here on the street posing a danger to civilians. Let us up.”

“ _Civilians_ ,” said Strange, unimpressed. There was a click. “Push the door.”

Rather than wait for an elevator, Steve made an attempt to bound up all ten flights of stairs with Loki in tow: the latter foiled this plan by taking the steps one at a time, at a normal pace, his teeth gritted behind the gag.

“Move,” Steve suggested.

Loki tipped his head back over his shoulder and smirked around the rubberised rope. He did not pick up the pace.

When at last they came to the door of Strange’s palatial apartment, he had plainly been waiting a while.

“You do know there’s an elevator?” he suggested. Without his uniform of Disney villain collar and sartorial pantomime he looked even weirder than the publicity stills: immaculate dark hair and a fetishistically-neat tiny beard, oddly pointed eyebrows intact, but all suspended above a good-quality wool sweater and what appeared to be either a sarong or a lavalava. 

Steve didn’t dignify the remark with a response, and only dragged Loki inside.

“I feel I should congratulate you both,” said Strange, closing the door behind them. “Captain Rogers, Mr---?”

“Wilson,” said Sam, leaning on a bookcase.

“Don’t lean on that,” said Strange, curtly. “It contains a large number of very rare and very old works.”

Sam stood up straight again.

“You appear to have captured a god with some plastic handcuffs,” Stange said, raising his eyebrows. This, given their shape, only served to make him look ludicrous. Sam covered his mouth with his hand and made a poor pretence at a coughing fit, which was at least lent credence by the strong smell of incense emanating from one of the other rooms.

“He’s the carrier of the object,” Steve said, keeping a firm grip on the cuffs, “not the object itself.”

“I see,” said Strange, sweeping his gaze up and down Loki. “What object might this be? I was under the impression that SHIELD had already acquired the Tesseract.”

“Acquired and gave away to Asgard,” Steve said, promptly. 

Strange made a small moue of disapproval. “And now you’ve brought a god into my apartment with no warning and no protection,” he sighed. “What is the object? Where is it?”

“It’s a small, smooth pink pebble,” Steve said, holding the forefingers of both hands apart the approximate length of the stone. “Has a kind of oily, rainbow-ish sheen on it. Opaque.”

Strange, apparently unaware of how stupid he looked, laced his fingers together and steepled the index ones against his lips. He pointed these two peremptorily at Steve. “Yes? Go on?”

“It has uh,” Steve glanced at Sam, who gave him absolutely no help whatsoever and turned his attention to the ‘very rare, and very old’ works on the shelf behind him. “It has … psychosomatic effects on people in the proximity. Touching it, to begin with, although it seems to have expanded its range now.”

“What effects?”

Steve stared very hard at Loki, who was trying to laugh into his gag, and then at Sam, who had picked up a book with a dark red leather cover and appeared to be preoccupied with trying to translate Latin.

He straightened up, fixed his eyes on a spot somewhere five feet beyond the opposite wall, and pretended he was being asked a difficult question by a commanding officer. “The stone in question produces physical effects against the will of the person in contact with it congruent with the effects of sexual arousal,” he snapped, cutting off just short of where ‘sir’ would go. 

Strange eyeballed him for a moment, and raised one of his peaked eyebrows. “Interesting,” he said, once again steepling his fingers. “This is quite fascinating.”

“What is it?” Steve asked, keeping a light grip on Loki’s cuffs but otherwise neglecting to restrain him.

“I have absolutely no idea,” said Strange, frowning. “I’ve heard of nothing similar.”

Steve caught Loki rolling his eyes at this, and fought the urge to kick him.

“Can you _help_?” he asked, instead.

“Maybe,” said Strange, preoccupied. “I would have to study it. For this individual to be pursuing it, it must be an artefact of some considerable power beyond the… effects… you’ve described.”

“Obviously,” said Sam, from the bookshelf. Strange shot him a contemptuous look, and went back to brooding.

“He has it,” said Steve, jiggling Loki’s cuffs. “Somewhere on him.”

Strange reached up and removed the rubberised rope from Loki’s mouth, with a knife Steve hadn’t previously seen. By the bookshelf, Sam returned the volume in his hand to its original place and winced.

“Where is the stone?” Strange asked, giving Loki a penetrating look.

Loki raised his somewhat less silly-looking eyebrows and said, “Is this what passes for a magician on Midgard? Utterly pathetic.”

“I _will_ find it,” said Strange, calmly. 

“Looking for it is just going to make the sensations worse,” Loki said, with the kind of smile that got people put away in hospitals where everyone spoke very quietly. “And you’re not going to find it anyway.”

Strange, who had briefly laid a hand on Loki’s shoulder, removed the hand abruptly and narrowed his eyes. “If these gentleman will allow me the time, we will see about that.”

Steve and Sam exchanged a glance. The longer things took, the harder it would be to track where Bucky had gone, the harder to bring him back, the harder to rescue him from being made use of by who knew what shadowy and heinous organisation Loki had traded him with. He looked at Loki, relaxed and smug in his plastic cuffs, and wished that there was some moral convention that would allow him to just sock the piece of shit on the jaw a few times.

As if reading his mind, Loki twisted in his grip and said, “You know the people who purchased your fragment are definitely _not_ in Paris, what are you doing here?”

* * *

Steve stood in the echoing corridor just outside Strange’s borrowed apartment, one foot in the door to prop it open, and listened to Natasha explain that no, no progress had been made and that yes, if Loki said they definitely weren’t in Paris it was probably reasonable to assume that they were. 

He glanced back into the apartment, but could see nothing beyond a sliver of bookshelf and the light pouring in through an unseen window. The part of him which still remembered the drip, drip of a cracked ceiling and the way the damp had climbed up the walls and made his chest feel as if he was drowning thought sourly, _nice work if you can get it_. Acres of carpet and the kind of tasteful seclusion that was sought-after by dukes, squandered on dubious old books and a man whose eyebrows had taken a shine to racist 1930s cartoons of The Yellow Menace and refused to be budged.

“I don’t suppose,” said Strange icily, from the other side of the door, “that you’d consider leaving my apartment and returning for your captive at some point when it is a little more convenient?”

“Not cramping your style, are we?” Sam asked, in a tone Steve recognised, and smiled at.

“Excessively,” said Strange, with a tone Steve also recognised. “He is secure, I have no further use—“

“No further use for a pair of meat-headed military types?” said Sam, and Steve realised he hadn’t heard a word Natasha was saying.

“Sorry,” he said, “go through that again?”

“Keep me on comms,” said Natasha, shortly. “Did you find the stone?”

“He’s got it,” Steve muttered, “but no one can get close enough to work out where.”

“Strange?”

Steve was suddenly possessed by the desire to respond, _yes, it is_ , but realised well enough that Natasha was the wrong audience for it. Bucky, he thought, would have appreciated it. Bucky would have groaned abysmally and punched him lightly in the arm, and Steve would have hit him back harder and said _don’t baby me, you jerk_. Steve sighed. If Bucky had been in any state to punch him in the damn arm he wouldn’t need to be in Paris letting easy jokes slip by him. 

“Steve?”

“Yeah,” said Steve, rubbing the back of his neck. “No, I don’t think he’s tried yet. I’m hoping he’s got a way around this… forcefield of…”

“Fuck.”

“What?”

“Forcefield of fuck,” said Natasha. “It alliterates.”

“I’ll see you,” said Steve, slipping a comms earpiece in. “Don’t go away.”

He pushed the door open again and gave the nod to Sam. Strange had left – back in the other room, Steve supposed, wherever they were holding Loki – and the apartment smelled a little of incense. Not the way that Catholic and Episcopalian churches smelled of it, but more like the kind of stores that sold yin-yang jewellery and hemp pants. 

“What’s the plan?” Sam asked, closing the door behind him. 

“I don’t have one,” Steve confessed, making for the stairs, “but I can’t sit where I’m not needed and listen to that asshole refuse to cooperate. I think they’re somewhere in this city.”

“Good call,” agreed Sam. “If Loki’s trying to deny it—“

“Where did you get that jacket?” Steve took the corner at speed.

“Loan from Strange,” said Sam, temporarily embarrassed. “I tore the back of my shirt on that cab handle.”

“The book a loan from Strange too?” Steve asked, nodding at the lump in the pocket of the dark green leather.

“Sure,” said Sam, as they took another corner. “I guess he thinks we’re going to need it?”

* * *

Ten minutes later he pulled up short outside a Metro station, Natasha relaying a stream of ‘I don’t know’ into his ear. 

“If we still _had_ the network that was in place,” Natasha pointed out. 

“That was infiltrated by Hydra and completely untrustworthy?”

“What about Hydra safehouses in Paris?” 

“Steve.” She sounded exasperated. “It’s been over a month. They’re not still going to be using them.”

Steve made a frustrated noise in the back of his throat. “There has to be some way to narrow it down from the whole damn city.”

Sam cleared his throat, stepping out of the way of an oncoming tide of schoolkids. “There is _one_ possible hiding place that springs to mind,” he said, when they’d passed and it was possible to hear anything other than Francophone arguments. 

“Huh?” Steve asked, temporarily muting Natasha. 

“Where would you keep someone if you didn’t want them to be found or able to contact anyone?” Sam asked, looking pleased with his own discovery. “If you couldn’t trust that any hotel room or apartment in your name was going to be safe?”

Steve shrugged. “Disused warehouse?”

Sam said, “There’s miles and miles of tunnels under Paris. People used to hide whole criminal gangs in them.”

Steve blinked. “Of course.”

“Yeah, don’t rush to congratulate me,” said Sam with a smile, “Strange mentioned them and I couldn’t get the idea out of my head. They found a cinema down there. People have been living in them – the rent in Paris, he said – so I guess, where _would_ you put someone you didn’t want anyone to know about, you know?”

Steve checked his phone. “Metro map, Metro map…”

* * *

The line for the entrance to the Catacombs stretched around the block. Steve settled for biting the end of his tongue rather than voice his impatience: he wasn’t too sure ‘get out of my way, I’m Captain America and I have an important mission’ would go over well in France, and he was damn sure he didn’t want to turn into the kind of man who pulled rank in non-emergency situations. The part of him that would have split the sidewalk and burrowed down into the earth with his bare hands to get Bucky back argued: _it **is** an emergency_ ; the part of him that listened when Agent Hill talked about image management and diplomacy told the first part to be patient.

He wondered where Agent Hill had gone now that her first name was no longer “Agent”. 

He cast an eye over the line; he cast an eye over Sam, who was cloud-spotting with a degree of boredom the airforce really ought to have drilled out of him. 

“Hey, soldier,” said Steve, nudging him. “Poker face is slipping.”

Sam gave him a genuinely troubled look, and flashed an awkward smile. “Still not sleeping too well,” he said, and Steve backed down with a guilty pang.

Thirty minutes later, when they’d been staring at the sign instructing them to be careful on the stairs and explaining in a variety of languages whose fault it definitely _wasn’t_ if anyone slipped and fell and broke their necks for the better part of ten minutes, they crested the top of the stairs in question.

 _Clang, clang_ , and down they went. 

Steve checked his phone, which obligingly told him it couldn’t pick up any signals of any kind and stop asking.

He showed the screen to Sam. “You were right,” he said, as tourists pushed passed them with a tut, “no one’s sending out a distress message from down here.”

Sam nodded. “Perfect prison. No one can find you in the dark, and you can’t tell anyone where you are.”

Steve shivered. “Good thinking.”

Sam shrugged, as they followed the main stream of tourists away from the stairs and into the poorly-lit underworld. “I just thought, where in Paris would I least like to be tied up.”

* * *

The tunnels stretched on, and on. It was hard to determine distance underground, without the usual reference points, and with everyone ahead of them shuffling along like they were heading to the guillotine. It was cold, and apart from the occasional flash of phones as people persistently ignored the hand-painted signs demanding no flash photography, the lights rigged up were more atmospheric than illuminating. 

Shadows sloped off into vast banks of darkness within paces. Walls of mournfully smiling skulls added a sense of terrible urgency to his task. Steve bit his lip.

Sam stepped off the path, and vanished into the shadows.

“What the hell—“ Steve began, following him.

“They’re not going to keep him in the parts the tourists go through,” Sam explained, making surprisingly good progress in the complete absence of light. 

“Yeah,” Steve said, closing his eyes to help them acclimatise to even lower light levels. “Good thinking.”

“Not just a pretty face and a set of biceps to die for,” Sam said, and Steve could hear the smile in his voice even if he couldn’t see it. 

Without any light at all it was even harder to tell how far he’d come. Steve felt his way through one doorway – the damp earth against his fingers bringing back what felt like someone else’s memories, some Ur-soldier sensation of creeping forward in the dark toward an unknown enemy, praying he could find his way back out – and began to wish he’d brought something. Trackers would be no good – no homing signal under all this rock – but _something_.

A ball of red wool, suggested the part of him who’d worked his way through a series of paintings on the better-known Greek myths at art college. He laughed at himself.

The floor grew ever-more uneven under his feet. Plainly no one came here much, and that – Steve thought, trying not to cross his fingers in the blackness – meant more chance of finding Bucky. If they had him, they had him off the beaten track.

Sam stumbled. Steve heard the caught breath, the misplaced footstep, and had darted forward to grab his arm and chest before he’d even registered what he was hearing.

Sam’s arm was warm in the cold of the Catacombs, his pulse surprisingly slow for someone who’d taken an unexpected tumble in an unknown place. _Cool as cucumber,_ Steve thought, with a certain degree of envy.

“Okay?” he whispered. The darkness, he thought, dampened the desire to speak at a normal level. It was like stepping into a cathedral. Heck, from what he knew of the Catacombs there _was_ a cathedral down here.

“Okay,” Sam whispered back. “You can let go of my arm.”

Steve realised he’d dug in his fingers, and went to apologise.

The words caught in his throat. His palms felt damp: his mouth dry, his tongue more mobile than it ought to have been. He licked his lips, and felt warmth pass from the roof of his mouth into his brain with the movement. 

Somewhere in the blackness, something dripped. Steve took a breath: his skin had become tighter than it used to be, and he was sure his clothes had too. It was the sudden awareness of his hips, the reappearance of a specific set of nerve endings on his mental map which told him what he was already growing afraid of.

“God _damn_ it,” Steve hissed, sinking his fingers more firmly into the forearm in his grip.

There was an eloquent silence.

“Any god in particular?” Sam’s voice asked.

“Don’t fucking do that,” Steve said, between gritted teeth, as sweat began to run down his forehead. “ _What did you do with Sam?_ ”

“Why do you care?” asked Loki, wriggling out of Steve’s grasp like a greased eel. “You didn’t care enough to notice before now. I don’t think you really wanted him with you in the first place.”

Steve lashed out in the blackness, and felt his fist connect with something warm and hard which he hoped like absolute hell was Loki’s jaw.

* * *

No tourist walking through the dimly-lit caverns of the Catacombs, deep beneath the streets of Paris, completely disoriented and surrounded by empty skulls, wants particularly to overhear the distant sounds of battle.

“Did you hear that?” whispered one girl to her mother, who stared resolutely at the ceiling and said:

“No,” in contravention of her ears picking up a very faint, very muffled, very distorted string of English swear words.

“I thought I heard something,” the girl persisted.

“Just bones settling. Vibrations make them move minutely. We’re probably unsettling them with our feet,” said the girl’s grandfather, slogging away in front of them.

In the far-off blackness an echoing _fuck you_ gave the lie to this explanation, but by the time it reached them a couple behind were talking over it.

* * *

Fighting Loki was, Steve was learning, an exercise in continual frustration. Apart from being a slippery psycho with less grasp on the rules of fair combat than even the most pugnacious of back-alley jerks that he’d grappled with, Loki also liked to change voices, shapes, and positions with nauseating speed in an attempt to throw him off – either physically or mentally.

“Fuck _you_ ,” Steve grunted, locking his hands around the Asgardian’s throat as Loki began to taunt him, gently, in Bucky’s voice.

“Well you can’t do that unless you _find me_ first,” said Loki, using Bucky’s voice.

Steve tried very hard to smack Loki’s skull against whichever bit of the ground felt like it was the least forgiving, but in the pitch black there was little to aim for.

Loki had a knife. Steve had encountered it once already, scouring a hot strip of pain across his stomach but – as far as he could tell – not penetrating enough to do real damage. He could feel his blood drip, harden, knit, and rip open again as the fight progressed.

Loki also had—

Steve snarled and, moving on an instinct much older than the serum, tried to head butt Loki in the face.

\--also had a significant psychological advantage.

Another knife scrape across his chest – Steve smacked the knife hand into the dirt, felt and heard the knife slither out of Loki’s fist and across damp earth.

“What have you done with Sam?” Steve barked, trying to drive his knee into something he knew to be armoured but wanted to be effective. Loki squirmed and writhed under him, pulling away from the blow.

“Bucky, Sam,” Loki snorted. “Make up your mind.”

“What the god damn hell did you drag me down here for?”

He felt Loki’s shrug as clearly as if he’d seen it. “Why would I tell you that?”

The glob of damp, viscous fluid on his face shouldn’t have come as a surprise. He flinched back momentarily – gave enough for Loki to twist and try to sink his teeth into his wrist – but Steve kept his grip on Loki’s throat punishingly tight.

The psychological advantage was pink and cloudy and omnipresent, and Steve battled for breath. He tried to concentrate on how much the knife wounds in his chest and stomach hurt him, only they barely did now; he tried to think about what a goddamn fool he was for letting Loki trick him the same way twice; he tried to focus on how the hell he was going to get out of this cavern and drag his prisoner back to where Strange might or might not even still be alive…

It was like wading through mental treacle. Every spot at which his body even slightly touched against Loki’s was a hot, bright star on his consciousness: his skin fit poorly, and his hands anchored themselves to wrist and throat as much out of desperation as practicality. He could feel, too, the way dark and disturbing sections of his mind unfurled at the pressure, at the –

Steve pulled his hips back up.

Loki made a revolting gurgling choking noise in the blackness, and faced with every other drain on his mental energy, Steve really could not bring himself to care that he was possibly in the process of inflicting permanent brain damage, if not death, on the lying piece of shit.

He had no idea how long he lay there. 

Every second felt like a small and uncomfortable eternity. His breath grew ragged, his body heavy: an impetus to move in ways that he had no intention of moving washed over him again and again. Loki continued to gurgle, gasp, and occasionally succeed in sucking down a breath: Steve felt his one free, knifeless hand paw weakly at his arm and only had an iota of sanity left to despise how good it felt, and the various _ways_ in which it felt good to know Loki was probably dying.

A circle of light played on a wall a few metres ahead of him, and Steve jerked his head up. His shadow appeared, distorted and demonic, against the pool of light.

A cry which his very disused French vaguely translated as “I see him” went up, and Steve tried to bully his vocal cords into cooperation.

“CALL THE POLICE!” he shouted, first in English and then, in faltering, crummy French, he called it again.

“Qua?” 

The light crawled over his body, down onto Loki—

\--Steve looked down into the face of an unconscious, bruised woman with dark hair and parted lips. He stared into the beam of the torch, trying to make out the shape behind it, and called out again for them to call the cops.

The torch light swung away from him, briefly illuminating the dimensions of the cavern, and then it was gone from his view, accompanied by the sound of running footsteps. 

Steve fought the urge to sink down onto Loki’s bullshit lying body in despair: then he fought the urge to sink down onto it in an emotion even less welcome.

* * *

“Where is Bucky,” Steve muttered, chasing off the fragmentary thoughts which attached sex to every name he mentioned and drove his hips forward whenever he didn’t concentrate on keeping them still.

Loki gurgled and wheezed in the darkness, and it was only when Steve leaned forward to check he was still breathing – swamped immediately by a host of unwelcome sensations – that he realised he was being laughed at.

“I don’t … keep track … of things I’ve already… sold… when I’ve… sold it,” Loki gasped, clearly amused in spite of his much-deserved suffering. “No… idea.”

“Bullshit,” said Steve, sticking his thumb into Loki’s windpipe against his better nature. “You keep track of everything.”

Even with one hand scrabbling desperately at Steve’s arm for release, Loki managed to convey the impression that he was still laughing.

“Why,” Steve growled, close enough to Loki’s face to feel his breath and close enough to find his brain drowning in disgusting suggestions, “did you warn me? What do you _want_?”

“Consider… this,” Loki said with difficulty. “Maybe I don’t… want… grrk… don’t want them to have him… either.”

“Who is _they_?” Steve blurted, immediately. “Why not tell me who if you don’t want them to have him—“

Loki snorted derisively. Under the circumstances it came out sounding like he was drowning in mud, and was followed by a wheeze so asthmatic that Steve temporarily loosened his grip a little in automatic sympathy. 

“You wouldn’t believe me,” Loki said in a ragged voice which gave Steve a new onslaught of uncomfortable feelings, stacking discomfort upon discomfort. “You have to find him yourself.”

There was a short, gruesome silence. Steve tightened his grip.

“I don’t know about you,” Loki said, faintly, “but I’m getting off on this.”

Steve ignored the obvious attempt to disgust him into moving, exposing some weakness, and only said, “Your goddamn stone,” right into the sneering shadow where Loki’s face must lie.

“Well,” said Loki, his breath warm and infuriatingly tempting to the magic-addled urges of Steve’s body, “that’s some of it.”

* * *

In a way, Steve thought, as he struggled to remain conscious and locked in a hateful embrace with Loki, he had to be grateful to the pink stone, wherever Loki had hidden it. Without the continual disquieting tide of sexual imagery and urges tormenting his brain, he’d droop into some less wakeful state, and Loki would escape.

He explained this to his prisoner, who shrugged in a very unsettling way and said, “Who says I’m not enjoying myself?”

Steve bit the inside of his mouth and stared into the dark. Loki was warm and yielding beneath him, except in the one place he’d have preferred yielding to take place.

At first he thought it was merely a fevered imagination, his eyes finally adjusting to the complete absence of light: the blackness tinged with the faintest hint of grey, and the merest suggestion of shadows formed.

The room flooded with several beams of light, temporarily blinding him. 

“Fuck,” whispered Steve, as he heard several voices instructing him in angry French to get off the woman and raise his hands.

 _Well_ , Steve thought, his fingers locked around Loki’s throat, _they’re probably not going to shoot me._

He took three or four tries to convey his identity – on the third the police accepted that he was an idiot foreigner, and at least one officer obliging switched to yelling at him in English:

“WE DO NOT CARE IF YOU ARE CAPTAIN AMERICA, YOU MUST STOP STRANGLING THE WOMAN OR WE WILL –“ there was a brief, hasty discussion about the correct verb in which Steve gathered that they didn’t want to shoot him but were not entirely adverse to acting against their desires in this instance.

“This isn’t a woman—“ Steve tried, but this went down about as well as ‘Je suis un Avenger’ had. 

“LET HER GO,” shouted the same officer again. 

Steve took a deep breath and tried to calculate whether it was more important to prevent Loki from potentially attacking the police, or to prevent the police from harming themselves by attacking _him_. Loki lay deceptively still underneath him, and he knew without looking that the tricky piece of shit was once again modelling his look on _delicate innocent_ instead of _crazy asshole_.

He raised his head.

“Don’t let her out of your—“ he began

The officer tasered him in the small of the back.

“H—“ said Steve, and blacked out.

* * *

He woke strapped to a stretcher, with daylight caressing his face and stinging his eyes.

“Shit,” Steve muttered, sitting up.

“ _Merde_ ,” cried a paramedic, as the straps snapped unheeded. 

“Where is he?” Steve demanded, and got himself together sufficiently to repeat himself in French. The paramedic stared at him for a moment, and then a minute longer, every second adding to her general sense of confusion and worry.

“She,” Steve corrected himself, annoyed. “The person they pulled out of the Catacombs with me?”

“Oh,” said the paramedic, shaking her head. She gave Steve another troubled look. “She left once she’d woken up.”

“Did they taser her as well?” Steve asked.

“I don’t know,” said the paramedic, openly glaring at him with her arms folded. “I just got here. Why did you break those straps? You know the ambulance service is not drowning in money, Mister Avenger?”

“Sorry,” Steve blurted, climbing off the stretcher and feebly trying to arrange the snapped straps into something less obviously destroyed. “This is important – did you see where she went?”

“No,” said the paramedic testily, “because I only just got here.”

Steve scrambled toward her and grabbed her by the shoulders. “Are you sure you don’t—“

She glared at his hands. He removed them hastily and nodded a couple of times before the word _Sam_ passed through his head like a freight train, shaking everything else loose. 

“Gotta go—“ he took off down the sidewalk.

“The police want to tal—“ he heard the paramedic say, but he was already gone.

* * *

When not one of the other residents of the expensive apartment building in which Strange was temporarily resident would answer their doors, Steve turned his attention to the wall.

“No different to a climbing wall in training,” Steve grunted to himself, and began hauling himself up the frontage.

He had gone maybe twenty feet before a man, passing on the sidewalk below, treated him to a voluble volley of French invective about what he thought he was doing, who he thought he was, and how precipitously he, the passing Parisian, was going to call the police. Steve, in the process of discovering the precise relationship of structural necessity to frilly baroque revival detail on the side of the building, paid little attention and indeed translated little beyond ‘non’, a general sense of ‘disopprobrium, and ‘gendarmes’.  
He muttered something ungallant about the public-spirited Gallic mindset and nearly yanked off a fatuous swirl of limestone in the attempt to pull himself on the next windowsill up.

Strange’s window had been appropriately locked.

Steve wrapped tentatively with his knuckles, wondering where the hell Peter Parker was when you needed him, and following up his own thought with ‘Parker can’t afford plane tickets any more than you could at his age’; although at least Parker could afford to attend college a little more consistently. 

In part, Steve thought without giving the thought much attention, thanks to his own efforts.

No one came to answer.

“Good enough,” Steve muttered, and put his fist through the glass.

Several alarms went off at once. 

He pulled himself through the window, and fell immediately on his face.

“Shit,” Steve said, trying to stand and losing his footing again. 

His vision went green.

Steve said several more words which were more suited to the U.S. Army than the drawing room, and tried to roll onto his back.

He found himself back on his face.

“Speak your name,” said a pleasant, characterless female voice.

“Steve Rogers,” Steve grumbled, trying to pull himself onto his elbows. 

“State your affiliation,” said the same characterless voice. Steve squinted ahead of him, and saw only bare, beautiful female feet. Each of them was as brassy as a freshly-polished and poor-taste statue.

“Avengers Initiative,” Steve suggested, trying again to roll over. He was politely, and without any apparently pressure, dumped back on his face.

“State intentions,” said the pleasant female voice which, Steve realised, had a very faint metallic undertone.

“To – just let me up, goddamnit,” he growled. “To save Strange – if Loki’s left him alive – and Sam – what is this thing?”

“Cleared for entry,” said the pleasant voice.

Steve made a violent effort to stand and, as all the restraint on his movement was immediately released, overbalanced and hit the back of his head on the windowsill.

He said something extremely rude and moderately blasphemous which he’d almost certainly learned from Bucky once, and rubbed the back of his head.

There was a life-sized naked state of a brass woman six feet in front of him, her arms held stiffly at her sides and her chin lifted, like a soldier standing to attention.

“Was that you?” Steve asked. 

The statue did not answer him.

Steve eyeballed the statue for a little longer, and, when he began to feel uncomfortable with this, Steve reached onto the adjacent armchair, and scooped up a slightly moth-gotten blanket with the faint remains of a hotel name printed on the centre. It looked at least as old as he was. 

He draped it around the statue’s shoulders until it covered her up, and began a cautious sweep of the large apartment.

As he stepped out of the room, he could have sworn he heard a gentle whisper, a little metallic, very precise:

“ _Thank you_.”

* * *

Steve found more arcane and troubling paraphernalia in Dr Strange’s borrowed apartment than he cared to enumerate; but he didn’t find Sam and Strange. He found no trace of them in what he assumed had originally been intended to be the dining room, where a large wooden table with the outline of a man exploding into distinct lines had been scorched; Steve began to feel uneasy with the potential uses of the table and backed out of the room.

He saw nothing of either in the library, where books older than America were stacked up to the ceiling: most had Latin or German titles, although some were in French, Italian, and something Steve reckoned was either Greek or a language using Greek letters. Those he could translate at all were not edifying and many of them persisted in a kind of vagueness ( _The Nature and Type of Spirits Derived From Natural Matter_ ) which did little to enthuse him. There was also a mark in the dust of one of the glass-fronted cabinets. 

Steve squinted at it. If it was a sigil, he would have been none the wiser, but to him it looked decidedly like a finger smudge. The ghostly, grim-looking articles inside were unbalanced in distribution – most people, Steve acknowledged, liked to lay out items for display with equal amounts of space between them.

He turned sharply on his heel at some infinitesimal noise and stole out of the library as stealthily as he could.

The bedroom yielded nothing beyond the knowledge that Strange was the kind of man who wore silk bathrobes and didn’t care who knew that. Steve tried to work out how much more apartment he needed to recon, but the dining room had already been a surprise, and beyond the functionality of the bathroom and kitchen he couldn’t see what else an apartment needed, let alone what it might have.

Thinking on this, Steve paced into the kitchen and found Strange and Sam suspended from the ceiling on butcher’s hooks.

For one awful moment he was certain they were dead.

While Steve’s heart obligingly leapt out of his chest and somewhere into his tonsils, Sam rotated violently in his bonds until he could get Steve in his line of sight.

“Oh,” he said, relief pouring off him, and with a broad, apparently untroubled grin, he added, “nice of you to make it.”

Steve jumped up onto the work counter – ignoring Strange’s wince – and unbound first Sam’s hands and then his feet. As Sam pulled himself up to the hook and dropped down with all the grace and athleticism of a professional gymnast, Steve got to work untangling Strange.

“What happened?” Steve asked Sam, at the same time that Sam said:

“So, what happened?”

Strange rolled his eyes. Steve squeezed his shoulder too hard and muttered, “Now don’t.”

Strange exhaled slowly and closed his eyes.

“I feel like a sucker,” Steve admitted, once he’d got the temporary owner of the apartment back onto his feet. He rubbed the back of his neck, shame-faced. “I can’t believe he fooled me like that _twice_.”

“Where is he?” Sam asked.

“Uh,” said Steve. “I screwed up.”

“We are equally to blame,” Strange said, with the magnanimity of a man who knows he really isn’t, “for being less than totally vigilant. Had I been on my guard, Loki would not have succeeded in overpowering either of us.”

“The stone?” Steve asked, shooting a glance at Sam. Sam raised his eyebrows and gave a pained, embarrassed nod.

Strange flushed a very deep and startling scarlet.

Steve slowly recounted the events in the Catacombs. He left out the sensation of deep and unpleasant enjoyment of feeling Loki’s life apparently begin to gutter between his fingers: the stone was explanation enough.

And, maybe, if he had encountered that kind of triumphal feeling before, and maybe if it had taken him the same _way_ even without the presence of Loki’s weird sexually violating magic rock, who needed to know?

“I take it back,” said Strange, leaning on the counter. “You _are_ an idiot. He’s at large, now? Armed with this – this unknown property.” He fanned his fingers out in an unnecessarily camp demonstration of dismay. “How will you find the miscreant before he harms more innocents?”

 _Miscreant_ , thought Steve, trying to appear more abashed and less mutinous. _Who the hell even says that?_  
Steve elected to refrain from a report on how badly he’d screwed up just yet, but when he got through to Natasha it didn’t matter anyway: she launched straight into her most recent finding.

“Where have you been? I’ve been trying to get through.”

“Underground,” Steve said, avoiding any other explanation.

“We’ve located Bucky,” said Natasha.

For a second he was almost disturbed by her directness, but he reminded himself that less time spent building up to a portentous offering was more time spent tracking Bucky down. “Where?”

“You’re not going to like this,” Natasha said. 

“Where is he?” Steve demanded, immediately wishing she’d go back to being direct. He lowered his voice as the echoes of his unintentional shout bounced back at him from the walls of the passage. “Where is he?”

“He’s being held captive by the Army,” Natasha said softly. “They want to understand what’s happened to him, and as far as I can tell they’re using the argument that as a US soldier and former prisoner of war he’s supposed to be in their care anyhow.”

Steve took a moment to unclench his fist before anything unhelpful happened to his phone. “The hell he is. What site is he at?”

“I don’t think blowing in there and demanding him back is the best strategy,” Natasha said, a little too dryly for Steve’s tastes.

“I have a plan,” Steve lied.

“Does it involve uttering threats against military officers until they give you Bucky back?”

Steve shifted uncomfortably.

“Does it involve actions against the US Army on US soil?” Natasha continued, in the same tone of voice that Steve really didn’t appreciate.

“No,” he muttered.

“I suggest you let me handle this,” Natasha pointed out. “Covert operations against my own side are more my forte than yours.”

“Natasha—“ 

“What happened to Loki?” she added.

“He’s escaped,” Steve said, too annoyed to bother to lie to her. “He still has the stone.”

“Listen,” said Natasha, “this could work out for us. If he has a reason to try to get Bucky back he’ll be drawn to where he’s being held, which gives you the opportunity and a _reason_ to defy the army in your capacity as a former member of SHIELD.” She paused, and just as Steve was about to say something, she added. “Consult Strange. He’ll know what to do about the stone.”

“He doesn’t have the first idea what it is,” Steve grumbled.

“That doesn’t mean he doesn’t know what to do about it,” Natasha said, hanging up.

* * *

He slipped back into the apartment, and by a process of elimination found Strange and Sam in the library, peering into the same cabinet he’d noticed while he was looking for them less than an hour before.

“Okay,” Sam was saying, “but what kind of consequences are we looking at, here?”

“I’d always thought,” Strange said, “that it referred to something metaphorical, and in any case more than half the message was untranslatable – a lot of those runes have never been properly explained anywhere and I hadn’t seen some of them anywhere else before. In light of this…” he trailed off, acknowledged Steve’s return with a tweak of his eyebrows, and went on, “… I can only assume it has a direct value to the Asgardian.”

“What’s happened?” Steve asked, thrusting his hands into his pockets.

“We found out why Loki let himself be brought here,” sighed Sam, standing back from the cabinet.

“He would have had difficulty breaking into this fortress on his own,” Strange said, gesturing to the glass-fronted cabinet, “but as a captive my perimeter guards were down. And he had access to this.”

“What did he take?” Steve asked, recalling the gap the display with a certain embarrassment. 

Strange said, “This entire cabinet is a holding pen for artifacts which elicited a strong magical response and had no literary mentions.”

“You mean you don’t know,” Steve sighed.

“I know what it _looked_ like,” Strange explained, patiently. “I don’t know what it _was_. A walrus-ivory carving – or what gave the impression of walrus-ivory – found on a beach near the Russian/Finnish border, well within the Arctic Circle, some eighty years ago. It was maybe four inches long and carved with a number of very small runes from a runic language no one was, or is yet familiar with. Part of one end was damaged and it appeared to be incomplete.”

Steve thrust his hands into his armpits. “We played right into his goddamn hands again.”

Strange gave him a look which, Steve readily understood, said, _”we” didn’t do this._

“Alright,” Steve acknowledged with a jerk of his head. “It’s my fault. But there’s still a chance to put things right. He must still have that artefact on him – unless he stashed it in the Catacombs, which doesn’t sound right – and I think I know his next move.”

He rapidly outlined his conversation with Natasha. 

“Unless,” said Sam, “it’s not Bucky he’s after, but the other stone.”

“What other stone?” Strange asked, alarmed.

“He mentioned another stone,” Sam said, “when we were interrogating him, before.”

“Chances are they’re keeping it at the same location,” Steve said, stubbornly. “I say we stick with Natasha’s plan. Strange?”

“I shall accompany you,” Strange agreed, “if you really believe the Army are as incautious as they would need to be, to keep a damaged killer and a mystical artefact in the same place.”

There was a pregnant silence. Sam threw up his hands. “Okay, _he_ isn’t gonna say this, because he’s still an Army guy, but I’m Airforce and I’ve got no qualms about this: they are _exactly_ that dumb.”

* * *

Officially the base was not supposed to have a name, but because the Army was made up of people, and people liked names, and people in the Army especially liked code names, it was known variously as Classified Six, The Base With No Name, Camp Fuck No, and Area Fifty, the latter being a riff by a former member of admin staff who reasoned that if spooky alien shit was Area 51, then spooky non-alien shit was probably a number down. 

Loki of Asgard, burdened with the image of a high-ranking officer, walked briskly and purposefully from the gates of Camp Fuck No. He made his way swiftly into the main building of the complex, and he began to look around him, head raised and eyes narrowed.

Somewhere around here was the other stone, the one he wanted. The one he _had_ cried out to it like a lamb for its mother, and owing to the location of his stone it was a hard cry to ignore.

Loki pressed on, stopping briefly before each locked door. Almost certainly they would keep it underground – the instinct of any being when trying to secure an object was to surround it with earth. He found a staircase, and headed down.

In the cool of a metal-lined basement, Loki strode with purpose towards the door at the end of a door-lined corridor. There were morgues down here, weapons, inventions. Each door contained a wealth of secrets, perhaps as poorly-understood by their captors as they would be by the general public, but he had one aim and one aim only; the room at the end of the corridor was where the second stone hid.

At the door he hesitated, piecing together something in his mind. He took out the runestick and reread it with interest. He slipped it back into his boot, and laid his hand on the door handle.

“Major Peterson,” said Tony Stark, from behind him. “What a surprise. I’d say it was a pleasant surprise, but since I happen to know you’re in Hawaii right now I’m just gonna go with ‘surprise’.”

Loki turned with a sickly smile, and peered at the fully-suited Iron Man with barely-disguised loathing. He assumed that this, at least, wouldn’t be out of character for anyone who had spoken to Stark before.

“Cover,” he said, with a grim smile. “Testing defences.”

“Uh huh,” said Stark, unconvinced. “You know, Major Peterson, I still haven’t thanked you for that gift you gave me for Christmas. Really beautiful. Completely appropriate. How did you even afford that on the kind of salary the Army pays?”

Loki, who was not a fool, was aware of a trap being sprung. He considered the possible outcomes, and said, “Don’t mention it.”

“Now where did you get a thing like that?” Stark added. Even without a face to draw reference from, Loki suspected his expression within his armour was one of deep disbelief.

“Ah,” said Loki, “that would be telling.”

“Yeah, it sure would,” said Stark, as two of his miniature rocket launchers rose from his arms. “Since Major Peterson hasn’t given me shit apart from a couple of new and very unflattering nicknames.” The rocket launchers illuminated themselves in red readiness. “Loki of Asgard, I presume.”

Loki raised both his hands in a callow mockery of surrender, and treated Stark to an apparently sheepish smile as his disguise slipped from him like sheet ice from the blade of a raised sword. “You got me,” he said, without sincerity.

“Looks like I do,” said Stark, his rockets still primed. “Now what are you doing in here?”

“Stretching my legs,” offered Loki, with what had once been a disarming smile, before everyone had got wise to the persistence of deception that ran through his entire person.

“Stretching my credulity,” retorted Stark. “Basement of a secure army base, middle of nowhere, sneaking around dressed up as Major Peterson… you’re after something. What have they got in here that you want?”

“Well if you don’t know,” said Loki, in his finest Thor-taunting tones, “I’m afraid I really can’t tell you.” He lowered himself cross-legged onto the ground before the door, keeping his hands raised. 

“Suits me,” said Stark, and jabbed himself aggressively in the armoured breast. “Thor.”

“Thor is in Asgard,” said Loki, peacefully. “Your bluff won’t work.”

“Thor,” Stark repeated. “You think I can’t talk to Asgard?”

“I have just spent several days in captivity at the hands of your comrades,” said Loki, leaning back against the door. “Do you think I believe they would have laboured in my presence if they could have passed me on to Asgard as easily as making a telephone call?” 

“Sit up straight,” Stark said, pointing one of the rockets at Loki abruptly. “Get away from that door.”

“As you wish,” said Loki, leaning forward over his own body. “But you shan’t convince me that—“

“You think I share every invention I make with the whole world?” Stark sneered. “Steve’s the goddamn communist, not me.” He cocked his head on one side, and added, “Thor. Come down here and pick up your trash. My coordinates plus the six feet it’ll take you not to smash me into atoms, thanks.”

Unsettled, Loki rose slowly to his feet.

“Get down,” Stark said, waving a rocket launcher at his face.

“No,” said Loki, lunging for Stark’s torso.

He clanged painfully against the metal, and waited.

“What the—“ Stark began, and he tried to jam his metal fingers under Loki’s shoulders to push him away. “Get off me.”

Loki waited.

“Look,” said Stark, after a minute, in a confused voice, “I don’t know what you’re trying to do – fuck if I even want to know – but hanging off me like a schoolgirl, weird though it is, isn’t going to change –“

The _armour_ , Loki thought, with annoyance. He released the tin can man, and was immediately knocked off his feet by an iron-fisted blow.

“Stay _down_ ,” Stark insisted, with irritation in his voice. “And quit getting your crazy all over my suit.”

A blue-white crackle rent the air.

“Oh thank God,” muttered Stark. “He’s come to make you not my problem any more.”

* * *

The means by which a select few Asgardians travelled between different worlds had, since the collapse of the Bifrost, been a closely-guarded secret. Unhappily for the pride of Asgard and the fate of worlds in general, other races on other worlds were not perhaps the childlike simpletons which Asgard had always uncharitably believed them to be. Quite apart from the Tesseract, there were races which used the cyclic weakening of interworld walls to pass between realms: in the cold depths of several seas vast beasts wandered unperturbed through barriers thought impermeable by their land-dwelling cousins, and chased their even stranger and darker prey through worlds without a second’s pause.

For the time being, those still of Asgard used Asgard’s means, and so Loki found himself stretched beyond reckoning and clamped too tightly against the breastplate of his adopted brother’s armour, as the stars streaked and reshaped around him, and experiences occurred which, were he in possession of the correct vocabulary, he might have described as “very quantum”.

The pink stone made its effects known immediately.

For the duration of the between-worlds travel, Loki was too preoccupied with retaining all of the atoms which made up his physical form to care much for how aroused that particular form might be. He could feel the answer in Thor, along with his discomfort, but as long as the stars continued to do things which were not only very quantum but also quite nauseating, he was content to be merely faintly bothered.

They burst through the rippling, diaphanous wall of realities like a knife slitting skin, and were disgorged onto the floor of a holding cell as pits spat from the mouth of a giant.

“Now,” Thor said, scrambling immediately to his feet, Mjolnir in hand, “how are we to retain our good name in the eyes of the Midgardians if thou wilt not remain where thou art put?”

“I don’t care,” said Loki, with entirely transparent honesty. His brother’s hair had grown long and golden in his absence, and not all of it wished to be restrained in a practical manner. Some golden strands fell about to frame his face. Loki reminded himself sullenly that he had a very powerful gem of sexual forces hidden about his person and that, were he fully insulated from its effects, he should be no more enticed by this view than Stark had been by him.

It almost worked.

Thor made a disgusted noise, and paced the length of the cell. “Thou art more trouble than a whole horde of marauding boar, more ungovernable than the rest of thine own monstrous parentage taken as one. Wilt thou not come to peace with us that we might face the challenges of this world _together_?”

“No,” said Loki, getting up slowly. “Don’t be an ass, Thor.”

“The roads of Asgard cry out for repair and I must spend the most part of every waking moment retrieving my wayward brother,” Thor said, flinging up his hand and hammer in despair.

“Here’s a thought,” said Loki, neglecting to comment on the likelihood of Thor addressing the problem of something as practical as roadbuilding when there were battles to be fought. Had _he_ kept the rule of Asgard there should be no need for complaint: Loki had studied kingcraft with honest interest, rather than fidgeting to be free for adventures, but he had no need of Asgard now. “Why not just … let me go? I wouldn’t trouble Asgard with anything. You would have free time to address those … pesky roads, I wouldn’t besmirch the good name of your kingdom. In fact,” he gave Thor a tight smile, “I wouldn’t even let on that I’d ever been here.”

“No,” said Thor, whipping round. “Thou art not to be trusted with your own liberty. Too many have died for thy causes.”

“Then I’m afraid,” said Loki with a rueful smile, “I must always be running, and you must always be chasing. Such a pity that you’ll never have a moment to yourself again. Think of all those roads.”

“This trick is weak,” Thor snapped, overstepping the usual bounds of personal space without blinking, and pointing an indignant finger directly into Loki’s face, “it shall not work on me.”

Loki only made prolonged eye contact and smiled a little. He thought, _if he feels the tenth part of what this accursed stone wrecks upon me, it is already working._

Thor frowned for a moment, and pushed Loki back into the wall with the heel of his hand upon the front of Loki’s shoulder. “I said it _shall not work_.”

“I’m not doing anything,” said Loki, raising both his hands in front of his breast in a gesture of surrender. “Quite frankly I’m through with trying to get a compromise from you or father. As soon as you’re off, I’ll be out of here again having a bit of a meddle…”

“Then it is my duty to guard thee,” Thor said, with a small glare of triumph. He put his other hand on Loki’s other shoulder, although Loki had not moved from the wall at all. 

“Well,” said Loki evenly, “that surely kicks my plans in the knee and leaves them reeling.”

“Do not think thou canst outwit me,” Thor said, staring him in the eye. It took a great deal of willpower for Loki not to give in to the hot pink urging that had by now spread from between his legs and up his back, and was in danger of overwhelming his scalp. “I shall be thy constant companion until every gap in this prison is plugged.”

The phrasing was unfortunate. Loki bit the inside of his mouth and swallowed.

“I can slip between the atoms of a molecule,” he bragged, stealing a few terms he had observed in use by Tony Stark. “You can no more keep me in this place than you can reorder the shape of the universe.”

“I shall not release thee,” Thor said, tightening his grip on Loki’s shoulders. “Brag though thou might.”

Loki noticed that Thor’s thumb wasn’t so much squeezing his clavicle as caressing it, and carefully remained staring into his eyes rather than let on that he was aware. He tried for a smug smile, but owing to the upheavals taking place within his body, managed something rather more sickly and conflicted.

“Thou art…” Thor frowned at him, with rather more sorrow than Loki might have expected. He wore the expression he’d borne when a favourite hunting dog had been beyond the reach of Mother’s healing and had to be tenderly ushered from the world to the embarrassing accompaniment of Thor trying not to cry. Loki wondered briefly if he had miscalculated and was about to die; then determined that if he was about to die he wasn’t going to go out to the wretched sympathy on his brother’s face.

“I am,” Loki agreed, “a truly appalling brother.”

Thor nodded, and his hand slipped along Loki’s shoulder, towards his neck. Loki swallowed delicately. He supposed there was an even chance that Thor’s desires would be as firmly centred around killing him as Rogers’ had been, and he would find himself throttled to death by someone who didn’t have the self-knowledge to be shamed out of it. 

“I have thwarted thy happinesses,” said Loki, resting his hand gently on Thor’s wrist even as Thor rested his hand firmly around the base of his neck: Thor’s fingers extended almost to his jaw, and covered the line of his pulse. “I have repeatedly broken your kingdom.” He gazed into Thor’s eyes with great tenderness, and said in a conciliatory tone, “I have tried to kill your mistress.”

Thor nodded slowly. The tip of his finger brushed the bottom of Loki’s ear. “Thou art mischief.”

“I believe,” Loki said, licking his lips, “we might be done with ‘mischief’ and speak instead of ‘evil’.”

“No,” said Thor, pressing his forehead to Loki’s forehead and his hips, rather alarmingly, to Loki’s hips. “Mischief. Thou art mismanaged and thou art selfish but thou hast no true passion for cruelty.”

“Good of you to let me know,” Loki murmured, his face unavoidably hot and his lips almost touching Thor’s. “I might have gone on thinking I was the bane of Asgard.”

Thor pressed his thumb into Loki’s deltoid and shook him a little. “What art thou if not Asgard’s most beloved bane?”

“Its most hated heir?” Loki suggested, not entirely following the line of his own speech because Thor had pinned him, by the hipbones, to the wall, and was now troubling every inch of him with a degree of fire he hadn’t expected.

Thor shook his head, an action which brought his lips briefly into contact with Loki’s, and to his very real annoyance left him gaping as if he’d been struck. The contemplation of such a combination – striking and near-kissing – did little to assist him in clawing back some self-control. Loki tried not to push back against the weight that held him passive, and only succeeded in making a humiliating noise that Thor could surely not help but hear.

Evidence of its reception came in the form of hot breath by his ear and a murmur of, “Oh, thou art _mischief_ in its worst—“ that reached no conclusion.

Loki sagged gently against his brother’s body and felt quite intimately the results of his meddling, as solid as Mjolnir and as present as its owner. “I.”

“Reap the rewards,” muttered Thor, reaching down abruptly to the belt which held several layers of Asgardian garb in sensible place about Loki’s body, and working to loosen it, “of thine own mischief.”

“Gladly,” said Loki, who hadn’t meant to say it out loud or to think it at all.

Thor spun him about, and in the motion peeled away the belt. He seized Loki by the arm and with a yank counteracted the momentum: he flung Loki face-first at the wall, and leaned hard against his back. 

Loki thought of the runes, scraped in ivory, and thought, _this had better work._

Any peevishness accompanying the thought was distinctly dulled by the slow, dissonant throb of his own body laughingly betraying him to the demands of a small pink gem. 

Thor’s voice came again in his ear: “Art thou _prepared_ for thy comeuppance?”

Loki shook his head.

Thor slipped his own belt between his teeth and pulled back hard enough that it bit into the corners of his mouth. “I shall not have thee lying to me in such a moment.”

Loki scrabbled indignantly at the bridle for a moment, but Thor’s weight on his back made the motions painful and inadequate. The steady pink throb that spread from his arse, through his balls, up his back, through the secret spiralling viscera of his body, betraying him endlessly, made the indignation fade in the face of desire. 

_Stop pretending you don’t want this._

All part of the plan, Loki reminded himself, as Thor squeezed one of his buttocks with a hand that was, Loki was sure, larger than he recalled it being. All part of the plan. Runes in the ivory. 

_It could have been anyone._

Loki drooled around his belt, felt the ball of Thor’s thumb brush slowly, indolently over the wink of his arse, and resigned himself – only within his own head – to the obnoxious truth.

It had to be him, after all.

* * *

Thor sat back on the floor of the cell. 

Loki rolled over and pressed his hand against the floor. He pushed up, and found himself on his feet with an ease that surprised him. He readjusted his clothing.

Thor gave him a curious look, and carefully removed a strand of his own hair from his face, stuck there with sweat. He looked pleased with himself, indolent, and exhausted. No different to the triumphant exhaustion of Thor winning a game, or Thor capturing prey.

His brother stood over him and contemplated, momentarily, driving his knife downward through the top of Thor’s skull. It might have been impossible ten minutes ago, but he felt now that such a blow could be struck without effort, and bisect the Asgardian from top to toe.

Loki let the thought and temptation drop from him. Splitting Thor in twain was not part of the plan, and deviation from the plan was a sure augury of failure. He felt the throb and wane of the stone within him, and on a whim that was to return to haunt him later, took the runestone from his pocket and tossed it to Thor.

It would, he thought, take Thor long enough to work out how to read it that the damage would be irreversible.

Thor gave him a puzzled look. “What is this?”

“An instruction manual,” said Loki, looking about him at the cell, “for a weapon of considerable strength.”

Thor frowned, and got slowly to his feet. “And thou hast some untoward motive in bestowing it upon me?”

“How can you say something like that?” Loki asked, stifling a laugh, “with what we have shared?”

Thor regarded him with suspicion. “Because thou art a _trickster_ , Loki Silvertongue, and always will be.”

“And _thou_ ,” Loki said, allowing Thor this one moment of intimacy, “art an on-switch.”

“A what?”

“You’ll see,” Loki said, with a grim smile. He turned to the wall of the cell. He looked through it, beyond it, between it: into the wall that separated world from world. Before it had seemed an impenetrable sheet. Now, full activation in place, it seemed rather more like a moving river – fast and mighty, to be sure, but permeable and alterable. The substance of the walls of the cell, and the walls of the world, and indeed of Loki himself, and of Thor, scowling at him with increasing discomfort as the last warmth of his orgasm faded from his mind – all these were as sparks of light.

Thor opened his mouth, no doubt to say something else condemnatory, and Loki reached out with his hand. 

Moving as if in a dream, he reached through the rushing waters of the universe, dipped his hand in the stream. He parted the sides of reality, and slipped through as if stepping through the curtain of a waterfall.

From where Thor stood, baffled, it was as if his brother had punched forward into thin air, and vanished in a sudden flash of light brighter than the sun.

He stared for a moment, then swore.

* * *

In Camp Fuck No, several alarms went off at once as a living breathing being appeared from apparently nowhere, directly in the vault in which a number of very confusing and very dangerous magical artifacts were kept under what was _supposed_ to be maximum security.

“It’s probably a glitch,” said one of the attending soldiers, as they approached the door. “It does this all the time.”

“It’s not a _glitch_ ,” said Tony Stark, fully-armoured and moderately offended, as he moved ahead of them. “I designed this, I don’t design things that _glitch_.”

“It’s a glitch,” muttered the soldier’s CO, behind him.

Tony Stark reached the vault door. He lifted up the visor of his helmet, and presented his eye for the scanner. He ignored the mutterings of the staffers behind him, and lowered the visor. He spoke the pass code. He waited.

“Glitch?” suggested one of the soldiers, in a friendly-and-definitely-mocking voice. 

“Maybe his suit has a glitch,” muttered one of the others. Tony hoped he knew that various voice amplification circuits in the suit’s auditory systems meant that he could hear exactly what they were damn well saying, but as he’d been careful to withhold that information from, say, the Initiative, Steve, and effectively everyone who was capable of understanding the concepts expressed, he doubted it.

“Sir?” asked the first soldier.

The door disintegrated.

“Oh this isn’t good,” Tony murmured. “GET BACK.”

“Sir we have orders to—“

Tony decided not to waste his breath on arguing: he wished afterward that he had.

Through the perfectly clear gap in which there had once been a wall, he saw a familiar and entirely unwanted silhouette. 

“Didn’t I _just_ send you off this goddamned world?” he complained, readying a blast to aim at the nuisance’s head. “What are Asgard’s cells made of, tissue paper? I’m gonna have to talk to them about taking out a contract with Stark Industries—“

He was sure, though, that the last time he’d seen Loki, he hadn’t been glowing faintly around the edges in a fetching shade of pink, or looking as if he’d been gently painted onto the world. Tony raised his hand, palm-out, and

Loki wasn’t in front of him any more and  
A burst of light brighter than the sun, more intense than the blast of a nuclear bomb temporarily blinded him and

When he regained the ability to _see_ again there was no Loki. 

He turned.

There were no soldiers either, not in the upright, living and breathing way there had been five minutes ago, just eight halves of four bodies, apparently cauterised, lying in a staggered streak along the floor.

“Ew,” Tony said, under his breath. “Jarvis?”

“Sir?”

“What the hell just happened?”

“I’m afraid…” there was a potent pause, in which Tony peered down at the bodies and nearly lost his equilibrium, “I’m afraid I can’t answer that, Sir.”

“You don’t know?”

There was another pause. “In order to accurately express the sequence of events, the language would require the addition of around forty new words.”

Tony blinked. “Just give me a basic idea.”

“Very well, Sir. A knife was involved.”

“That’s it?” Tony straightened up. “A knife was involved, and we are in a world of shit.”

“Yes, Sir.”

* * *

In a dedicated and coincidentally heavily-guarded hospital room with no windows, a man slowly regained consciousness. He had previously been known as James Buchanan Barnes, The Winter Soldier, and more affectionately as Bucky, but right now would have answered to none of those things. He felt … fuzzy. Uncomfortable.

The location troubled him. The bed spoke equally of respite and of torture, and when he tried to climb off it, several cloth straps prevented him. When he turned his head he found his stronger arm – metallic, attached at his naked shoulder by a line of sore flesh – tethered to something heavy, by something much more durable than soft cloth.

He let his gaze rove around the room, his heart beating too fast in the back of his throat. There was medical equipment. His chest contracted. Something terrible was going to happen, and he was needed somewhere else. Familiar feelings. He was supposed to be doing something.

Underneath the fight-or-flight and the overlaid panic of finding himself in a hospital room, there was the other old, nagging sensation: _someone is looking for you and you need to find him_ , but it presented itself, as always, without explanation.

The man who had once been Bucky and once been a weapon with which Hydra shaped the world stiffened as minute sounds outside his room came to his mind. They translated themselves easily into the sound of a fight being waged and lost, very quickly.

He tried again to sit up. 

There was a sudden bright light visible under the door. It was so intense that he was sure if he could see more of it he would go blind – he squeezed his eyes shut reflexively, and when he opened them again the light was gone and he was no longer alone in the room.

He inhaled sharply.

The stranger was very tall, and dressed bizarrely. He also exuded a faint, rosy glow in the darkness, evident whenever he stood in front of something a little blacker.

The man who had once been Bucky Barnes tensed his muscles, and waited for the attack.

The stranger strode past the foot of his bed, one hand holding a cruel-looking, short curved knife, the other balled up in a loose fist, as if it was carrying something. He stooped, and sheathed the knife in his boot. He took the wrist that was not metal, and spread out the fingers of the man once named Bucky.

Into his palm the stranger slid a smooth pebble, maybe the size of a silver dollar. It glinted, briefly, in a dark green, before the stranger closed the nameless fingers around it, and gave them a little pat.

“Shh,” said the stranger, straightening with his finger against his lips.

The stone felt colder than anything he had ever touched in his short memory.

The man who had once been Bucky lifted up his arm, and felt the straps fall away like cobwebs.


End file.
